I recently experienced the Badger Badger Badger! meme for the first time. Ten or more years late. But while I was unaware of it until last night, when I watched it for 15 minutes in a trance; in retrospect, it permeated the net I've inhabited for years. It's what all those Ubuntu people were referring to when the "breezy badger" release came out. It surely influenced memes I did see, including the recent nyan cat.
Interestingly, the first sentence of Dec Wars refers to another (more shortlived) Usenet meme:
Have you ever wondered what happened to all those characters eaten by arpavax?
The arpavax meme developed when a particular Usenet node, arpavax, began deleting the first several lines of messages that passed through it. In response, people began starting messages with some blank lines:
1
2
3
arpavax!
This continued for some time after arpavax was fixed.
In 1982, Usenet doesn't understand memes yet. While Dawkins coined the term in 1976, it's not been applied to the network. But, from a modern perspective, a few early memes can be seen in the posts here.
The first I noticed was Dec Wars, "the Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker, episode n" featuring 3CPU, Con Solo of the Milliamp Falcon, PDP-1 Kenobie, etc. It has so far been continued in episode n+1 episode n+3 episode n+4
I realized Dec Wars was not just a peice of amusing writing, but a meme when I came across a present-day reference it it. 30 years later and it's still in people's heads! Now, seeing a recent flurry of posts requesting it be reposted by people who only caught some of it (and what happened to episode 2?), I'm sure that it's a meme.
I've got my eye out for more early Usenet memes. A message I read today titled "Confessions of a UNIX Junkie" looks promising to be one. Good writing, tying into a long-running meme about computer addition that was only edging into popular conciousness in 1982, and with a final line that any Linuxer would appreciate: "Doomed, I'll never be happy until I've seen the kernel with my own eyes, license or no license!"
We're made the transition from A news to B news, following our upstream feed, Utzoo. The switch began on May 8th 1982. There were a few duplicate articles received on both A and B news. At this point, all new articles are from B news; the switch is complete.
At this historical remove, there's not a lot of visible difference between the A news and B news articles you will see in your news reader. One nice thing is that there are a pair of headers that show how long it took a message to propigate to Utzoo:
Posted: Mon May 10 13:25:04 1982
Received: Tue May 11 03:32:32 1982
In all, 11 thousand A news articles have reached olduse.net. There will be a lot more B news articles!
Update: Turns out that modern newsreaders don't do a good job of displaying From headers that contain only a UUCP bang path. Who knew? Rather than fixing all the news readers, I'm putting in a hack to the From headers of articles posted after this point.
"Today" in 1982, Mark posted a console mode pacman game to net.sources.
This is the first sizable program posted there. So, I downloaded it onto
my Linux system, and typed "make". And after just two fixes, I got it to
build, and it seems to work great. What a testiment to the portability of
Unix!
BTW, this implementation of pacman was discussed and improved quite a lot over the previous several months. I'd say it was the second most discussed game after rogue. The "real" Pac-Man was a big deal in 1981-82!
Ken explains why rogue is delayed. Nice to see April 1st celebrated in the traditional geek way 30 years ago!
But better yet is Announcing net.pcm, a truely precient April Fools:
Each week you will recieve approx. 360 million bytes of logarithmically compressed PCM data (at 20khz sample rate) which will wholly reproduce a complete LP.
Olduse.net was itself used in a prank in 2012:
This original article
was modified to provide convincing material
about ls -y having been used in SHAR files, as part of a
larger prank.
Pavel Curtis is a familiar name to me.. he wrote LambdaMOO! But here, he's just annoyed at email addresses:
I attempted to reply to a news item recently for which the return address was as follows: vax135!harpo!mhtsa!ihnss!ucbvax!C70:sri-unix!KING@KESTREL I have now received my letter back from vax135!harpo!mhtsa!ihnss!ucbvax!Network:c70 telling me that there was "No such mailbox at this site"
Could someone please tell me just what the address means and how it gets generated and how I'm supposed to reply to it?
The explanation was complicated; the address tried to traverse both Usenet and the ARPANET, and failed. Even parsing it was ambiguous.
Following up to that was this awesome post:
So you want a reply command that works 100% of the time? So does the rest of the world! The UUCP/Berknet/ARPA environment is just too weird and full of glitches for any static program to handle it. Berkeley's Mail program makes a valiant attempt but botches about half the time I try to use the reply command.
End-to-end communication that works all the time. Yes, that would be nice. 
While I've read repeatedly how Sendmail's baroque syntax was designed to allow for translation of email addresses between networks, I didn't really understand the motivation until I saw this thread play out on olduse.net. Was this thread perhaps an inspiration for sendmail? It will hit the olduse.net sometime this year.
Posted to olduse.net today, The Hacker's Dictionary!
Don't confuse this with ESR's New Hacker's Dictionary. This page, which also contains a later version of the file from 1988, is critical of ESR, for "changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing".
The version posted today is the canonical version, maintained by Don Woods, Guy Steele, and Mark Crispin on ARPANET since 1976. Their email addresses are included "if you'd rather not munge the file yourself".
Enjoy your YU-SHIANG WHOLE FISH!
Some uses of the net are so extremely obvious, messages so in tune with their medium, that it's impossible to imagine the net without them. Recipes, flamewars, pictures of kittens, porn.
So, it's startling to be confronted, in my daily news feed, with the first recipes posted to usenet.
Both because usenet had been around for over a year before someone thought to do that, and because the recipes posted are so simple.
Would anyone dare to post this recipe today?
Simple
Cook pasta for 2. Meanwhile, smash up a couple cloves garlic, sautee very lightly in 3 or 4 Tablespoons of olive oil. When the pasta is done, drain it and swish it around in the pan with this stuff a couple of times. Add more oil or garlic at will.
Maybe if compressed to 140 characters to fit in a tweet. Otherwise, it's too simple a thought to say. Surely someone said it before. And now we know when.
This may also explain why the first jokes posted to usenet seem so juvenile. Starting, literally, with a string of light bulb jokes. They are juvenile, but on this medium, they were being said for the first time.
Hard to believe I've consumed all of 1981's Usenet posts now on olduse.net, and it's been running for 7 months already.
Last night, there was a "very long" post, describing nearly every node on usenet in 1982. There had been a warning about this post the day before, since it would take many sites half an hour to download at 300 baud. It was handily formatted as a shell script, which created per-node files.
So, I ran this code nobody has run since 1982. It worked. I got files. I tossed them on the olduse.net wiki, and used some ikiwiki code TOVA contracted me to write just a few months ago, to make clickable links on my usenet map.
The map data was contributed in another post a while back. By 1982, usenet is getting nearly impossible to map with 1982 technology of ascii art. I enjoyed throwing graphviz, git, wikis, and the web at it.
So, we have a collaboration across time, me and "Mark" and a lot of people who described their usenet nodes and piles of technology that make creating a mashup easy. Awesome!
I blog about stuff I find on the olduse.net blog. It's an open blog; Koldfront also blogs there, and we welcome other bloggers.
Some of the highlights for me have included:
As the space shuttle program is winding down, reading the excitement about
the first shuttle flights, and the play-by-play coverage of a launch,
posted to net.columbia by a high school student borrowing his dad's
account. (A usegroup name that's hard to read without remembering
its fate).
The announcements of the Motorola M68k, the IBM PC, and the CD-ROM.
Reading the TCP-IP digest, and Postel's plans for launching IPv4 soon,
while the world IPv6 launch is being
planned now. (The nay-sayers are especially fun to read. Including the
guy who was concerned about the address space size, in 1981!)
Learning that nethack ascention tales have a history streching back 30 years, to rogue, and that the stories back then had much the same flavor as they do today.
Various celebrity sightings. Dennis Ritchie teaching C and Unix. Bill Joy talking vi. RMS talking .. nuclear politics?
The general development of usenet. B-news being rolled out, groups proliferating, many first inklings of what will be major problems and developments in 5 or 10 years. A shift in tone is already apparent, by now usenet is not only about announcements, there are already some flames.
Still 9 years to go!
This map is a collaboration between Mark, who collected the graph data and site descriptions, and a strange guy named Joey who seems to have technology from the future which quickly generated it.
You can click on many of the nodes to view the descriptions of the individual sites on Usenet in 1981 and early 1982.
See also: current usenet map
... even 30 years ago people were complaining about Emacs' keyboard shortcuts.
So, they haven't changed (fundamentally) in 30 years - is that a sign of success or failure?
Reading net.games, we can see that many things have remained the same
across decades of time and the evolution of rogue into nethack.
Through posted high scores, we can see that team ant has always killed more than its share of young adventurers.
There are tricky ways to cheat; the bug is always already known to the shadowy dev team, but a fix not yet released.
The post "a rogue's tail" is an early example of a style of storytelling often used in describing ascention or other notable nethack games today.
Tonite I finally put it all together. I was on level 15, I had a -1 ring of dexterity in my pack. I entered a dark room and there in front of me was the nymph. I quickly ran back into the tunnel. Slowly I dropped each possession as I walked towards the temple that would bestow immorality upon me. Saving my sword and armor least I be ambushed at the threshold I entered the room. Two squares lay between me and the nymph. I dropped my armor and stepped forward, Soon I would know for sure. I placed my mace carefully on the floor. I stood naked but for the cursed ring. Immortality?! I moved forward to attack the nymph. CRASH!! I had fallen through a trapdoor...
And of course the few who have found the amulet of YENDOR and escaped to tell the tale always lord it over the rest of us.
Here it is, not even 1982 yet and on net.news people
are complaining
about newsgroup names and too-specific
newsgroups.
This suggested renaming to a hierarchy with names like "net.rec.scuba" and "net.auto.vwrabbit" predates the Great Renaming by five years.
Another nugget of history from the usenet of yore:
"Stanford University Computer Systems Lab has designed and built a personal workstation that does not have a local disk. It is based around an MC68000. The vanilla SUN machine, as we call them, has a 68000 processor, 256Kbytes of memory on the processor board, a graphics board with a 1024x1024x1 frame buffer, and a 3Mbit Ethernet processor board. They are connected by a Multibus protocol, and housed in an 8-card cage with room for various expansions."
- The seed of Sun Microsystems <4716@Aucbvax.UUCP>
Dennis Ritchie explains the etymology of 'rc': <4857@0Aucbvax.UUCP> in fa.unix-wizards.
On usenet 30 years ago, you could read about "strcpyn" being renamed to "strncpy": <4702@Aucbvax.UUCP>
I am toying with the idea of changing the names USENET (the network itself) and netnews (the collection of software that implements netnews) both to "newsnet".[...]
Since this is a sweeping change, and since I'm not God, I would like to see discussion on whether this is a good thing to do.<127@Acbosgd.UUCP>
One of the suggestions was interesting: "WEB" 
Here are some of dmr's recent posts to olduse.net.
Today I added a list of some recently posted messages on a sidebar on the front page. This should help you find something new and interesting to link to, tweet, etc.
As usual, I had some fun with Haskell as I built this. The interesting problem was how to choose which recently posted messages to display? I don't want it to just display the 10 newest, because then an active thread could swamp the display. I wanted a nice variety of messages posted over the past few days. My solution was the following code, which probably speaks for itself.
reduce :: RecentMsgs -> RecentMsg -> RecentMsgs
reduce m n
| have sameMessageId = nuke sameMessageId
| have tooOld = nuke tooOld
| have sameSubjects = nuke sameSubjects
| have similarSubjects = nuke similarSubjects
| have sameNewsGroups = nuke sameNewsGroups
| have sameAuthors = nuke sameAuthors
| S.size m == 0 = m
| otherwise = nuke oldest
where
-- let's skip the implementation details
(Special thanks to Adam Sjøgren for making article.olduse.net so I can link to the articles!)
Today, 30 years ago, you could read a review of the Hazeltine Executive 80 model 20 terminal. It is fascinating:
Price:
$1295 (model 20 12" screen 80 columns non-detached keyboard)
$1695 (model 30 15" screen 132/80 columns detached keyboard)
For maximum retro, why not read olduse.net in a terminal from the period?
This screenshot is Usenet on an Apple II. Well, as emulated by xscreensaver, but the video artifacts, slow updates, and background snow make it seem very real when I'm using it to read about the continuing complications of the first Space Shuttle launch.
If you have an old terminal, hook it up to something and use it to read olduse.net, and post a picture!
In "Proposed modifications to cron" posted to the newsgroup fa.unix-wizards on September 10, 1981, the suggestion to add usernames to the crontab was put forth.
Some years ago the "Optimus Maximus" keyboard, designed by a Russian designer, with OLED displays for keys went around the world - such a fancy newfangled idea!
I think it took a couple of years until you could actually buy one. For ~1500 € - quite the bargain, one might add.
Of course the idea wasn't totally new - what idea is? - something very similar was mentioned on usenet in July 1981 actually: "Interchangable keyboards".
"IBM announced its new 8080 based personal computer yesterday." - IBM Personal Computer, in WorkS Digest V1 #6.
"This is the licensing arrangement that allows Onyx to sell Z8000 boxes with unix for reasonable prices. Microsoft also is in this category." - unix licenses for small machines.
In July 1981 you could read about the 10MHz 68000 on usenet, in the fa.info-micro group:
"Designeers requiring a 68000 faster than the current 8-Mhz microprocessor will gain 25% in throughput with the 10mhz version. The fast microprocessor is the result of Motorola's program for yield enhancement."
- <2477@Aucbvax.UUCP>.
The announcement came from a magazine called Electronics from June 16, 1981. News travelling at ... well, at most 1200 baud, I guess.
Bill Joy explains #! in 4.1bsd for VAXes: Re: Setuid shell files.
People were tired of the year 2000 problem discussions as early as 1985: "Will the computer bugs discussion end before the year 2000? "
"THIS IS NOT US. We may have a first here: the first real live authentic name conflict on Usenet. [Why me, Lord?] Would anyone knowing the possible identity of the other "utzoo" please pass this information on to me? My friend's comments suggest it may be in the Stanford area." - datamat!rumor, Thu Aug 13 00:56:51 1981.
Adam Sjøgren has contributed article.olduse.net, which lets us link to olduse.net articles by Message-ID. Thanks Adam!
In posts to the website, a link to a given Messsage-ID can be made using a shortcut, for example: [[!article 760@Autzoo.UUCP]] --Joey
So posted henry yesterday to the hacknews group in
760@Autzoo.UUCP.
As an experiment, for our first month on Usenet, recently completed, we have been getting all the news etc. that Usenet has available. Alas, this has a price, both in phone bills and in my time spent babysitting the link late at night. I have been doing some arithmetic about the costs involved, and the answer keeps coming out as Too Much. For a one-month experiment, ok, but on a continuing basis, no.If all this stuff were vital and important, that would be different, but much of it is fascinating but essentially trivial gossip. At 300 baud, this is a luxury we can't afford just now. So we are going to have to stop getting some newsgroups. Precisely which ones will get the axe I haven't entirely sorted out yet, but I must regretfully announce that human-nets and sf-lovers will be the first to go -- they are just too bulky. The detailed hit list will appear soon.
Anyone wishing to keep a particular "axed" newsgroup alive may do so by committing to pay for it (phone charges plus a surcharge for human hassle). This must be real money, folks. If your driving passion is to keep sf-lovers open, be warned that sf-lovers costs AT LEAST one hundred dollars a month.
Unfortunatly it's too late to pay for utzoo's long-distance calls
to North Carolina, or give them a 1200 baud modem, so from here out
oldusenet will probably be offering only a partial feed of Usenet,
unless another site steps forward to offer a feed of course. 
Meanwhile, keep an eye on net.news; some guy called "ucbvax!Onyx:glickman"
is talking about writing a new netnews. Who knows if anything will ever
come of it.
This post is updated as new usenet maps are posted on olduse.net.
USENET Logical Map - February 1, 1982 / Bill & Karen Shannon
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
cwrunix--cwruecmp watarts olduse.net
| | |
genradbolton yale-comix wivax | watcgl--watmath--ccnga (wormhole
| | | | | to 2012)
| microsoft | sultan | | ittvax--sii | Slinac |
| | | | | | | | | |
+=decvax=======+=====+=+==+=====+====+===+============+===+--utzoo------
| | | |
| | | cg-d
| | |
| | +=======+=pur-ee=+=======+ +=========+=====unc======+=====+
| | | | | | | | | |
| | cincy pur-phy uiucdcs purdue | wolfvax mcnc tucc
| | | | | |
| | pucc | dukgeri duke34 uok | phs |
| | | | | | | | |
| +==+======+======+======+=========duke===+=========+===+=======+==+==+==+=+
| | | | | |
| brl-bmd ucf-cs reed adiron psuvax--allegra alice--mitccc--mitmath |
| | | | |
| bio research---+=======+=====mhtsa==========+=====+=+ |
| | | | | |
| ihuxf ihuxg ihuxh ihuxi ihuxj ihuxk | ihlc8 ihldt druxj ih1ap hpuxa | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| +=+=+===+=+===+=+===+=+===+=+===+=+==ihnss==+==+=+===++=+==++===+===+ | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | ihuxl ihuxm ihuxn ihuxo ihuxp ihuxs | | ihima | | ihlpb | ihps3 | | |
| | | | | | | | | |
| | | | cornell | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | |
| | hocsd hocse hocsf hocsg hound | | vax135 | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | +=+hocsb+=====+=====+ houca | houti | | | rdb-----eagle-----+ | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | n o p r s t v w y | | | | | | | mhuxa | mhuxh | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | +==+==+==+==+==+==+houxi+==+=+=+=+=+===+ | | | +=mhuxj=+ | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | a b c d e f g h j | m ho3e2 | | | | mhuxm | | mhuxv | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | (houx*) +lime-+ | u1100a | | | mhb5c pyuxjj | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | cbosgd--cbosg | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | floyd presby u1100s--npois--eiss | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | |
| | +===+==+====+=======+========+=====harpo==+======+==+===========+=====+=+ |
| | | | | | |
| | whux1b scl--utah-cs--utah-gr zeppo--chico-+
| | |
+=+==ucbvax==+------------------------------+=====ucsfcgl=========+ esquire
: | |
ucbonyx : ucbcad ucbpop ucbcory nsc--menlo70--hao--cires |
: : : : : | |
+==ucbarpa=+====+==+=======+ intelqa--sytek--zehntel sdcarl
: : | |
ucbopt uwvax : src-unix gi sdcatta--sdcattb--phonlab
| | : @ | |
teklabs +=====ucb=====+ psi sdqmlab--sdcsvax--sdaaron
| @ @ |
tekmdp cca--ima sri-unix dcdwestvax
| |
azure csin
_______________________________________________________________________________
Legend: - | + uucp, : Berknet, @ ARPAnet, = "bus"
UUCP/USENET Logical Map - June 1, 1981 / mods by S. McGeady 11/19/81
(ucbvax)
+=+===================================+==+
| | | | olduse.net
| | wivax | | |
| | | | | |
| | microsoft| uiucdcs | | |
| | genradbo | | | | | | (wormhole to 2011)
| | | | | | | purdue | | |
| decvax+===+=+====+=+=+ | | | | |
| | | | | | | pur-phy | | | tekmdp
| | | | | | | | | | | |
+@@@@@@cca | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | +=pur-ee=+=+=====+===+ | | |
| csin | | | | | | |
| | +==o===+===================+===============o========teklabs=+
| | | | |
| | | pdp phs grumpy | wolfvax |
| | | | | | | | |
| | cincy unc=+===+======+======o======+ |
| | | bio | | |
| | | (Misc) | | (Misc) | |
| | | sii reed | dukgeri duke34 utzoo |
| | | | | | | | | |
| +====+=+=+==+====++======+==++===duke=+===+=======+==+=========+ |
| | | | | | | | | | u1100s
| bmd70 ucf-cs ucf | andiron | | | | |
| | | | | | |
| red | | | | | pyuxh
| | | | zeppo | | | |
| psupdp---psuvax | | | | | | |
| | | | alice | whuxlb | utah-cs | | houxf
| allegra | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | +--chico---+
| +===+=mhtsa====research | /=+=======harpo=+==+ | |
| | | | | | / | | |
| hocsr | | +=+=============+=/ cbosg---+ | |
| ucbopt | | | | | esquire |
| : | | | cbosgd | |
| : | | | | |
| ucbcory | | eagle==+=====+=====+=====+=====+ | |
| : | | | | | | | | | +-uwvax--+
| : | | | mhuxa mhuxh mhuxj mhuxm mhuxv | |
| : | | | | |
| : | | | +----------------------------o--+
| : | | | | |
| ucbcad | | | ihpss mh135a |
| : | | | | | |
| : \--o--o------ihnss----vax135----cornell |
| : | | | | |
+=+==ucbvax==========+===+==+=+======+=======+=+========+=========+
(UCB) : | | | | (Silicon Valley)
ucbarpa cmevax | | menlo70--hao
: | | | |
ucbonyx | | | sri-unix
| ucsfcgl |
| | |
Legend: | | sytek====+========+
------- | | | |
- | / \ + = Uucp sdcsvax=+=======+=+======+ intelqa zehntel
= "Bus" | | |
o jumps sdcarl phonlab sdcattb
: Berknet
@ Arpanet
USENET Logical Map
June 1, 1981
!- Uucp links olduse.net
: Berknet links !
@ Arpanet links !
(wormhole to 2011)
pdp !
(Misc) ! (NC) (Misc) !
decvax sii reed phs--unc--grumpy duke34 utzoo cincy teklabs
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! +--+----+-----+-+--+-------------+-------+------+ !
! ! !
! duke !
! ! !
! +------+---+-----------------------+--------+ !
! ! ! ! ! !
ucbopt ! hocsr--mhtsa----research mh135a harpo-----chico
: ! ! ! !
ucbcory ! ! eagle ihnss vax135 (Bell Labs)
(UCB) : ! ! ! ! !
ucbvax--++----------+--+--+-----+--+------+--------+
: @ ! ! ! (Silicon Valley)
ucbarpa @ (UCSD) sdcsvax ! menlo70--hao
: @ sdcattb-----+ ! ! !
ucbonyx @ +-----ucsfcgl sytek sri-unix
@ phonlab-----+
cca-unix sdcarl
See also: usenet map mashup
Check out the fa.apollo newsgroup, where they're discussing the
Xerox Star. Some highlights for me were a post that asked
"what are icons?" and complaints about the high traffic on the group, which
is up to maybe 10 messages per day, and thoughts about the possibilities
of windowing interfaces from a poster who had probaly not yet seen one.
So ahead of its time, and yet also so antique feeling. Indeed seeing this makes me see all icons (which are thankfully rare on my linux system) as the antique things they are.
Oh and also, there's an amazing post where Xerox bows out of discussing the
Star, for fear that even answering technical questions could be construed
as commercial advertising, which is refreshingly verbotem on oldusenet.
I've finished importing the usenet archive for oldusenet. The fun part was parsing the dates to put the posts in order.
No date format was really required on usenet, and so a wide variery of formats were used. Some posts didn't have a Date, but a guess could be made from their Message-ID. Some posts had absurd dates (ie, 1969, 1995), others had dates that were correct in every way.. except the year was left out (oops). One early post had a date of "_____".
Still, this excerpt of my code managed to parse the rest and so gives a fairly complete picture of how messy dates can possibly be. Read and weep.
p anyzone "%d %b %y %T" "15 Jun 88 02:27:41 GMT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %y %T" "Thu, 22 Jun 89 20:02:03 GMT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d-%b-%y %T" "Thu, 15-Jun-89 18:01:56 EDT"
, p anyzone "%d %b %y %T" "8 Jan 90 14:07:27 -0400"
, p anyzone "%d %b %y %H:%M" "4 Oct 89 19:56 GMT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %y %H:%M" "Thu, 23 May 91 02:13 PDT"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %Y %T" "Thu, 23 May 1991 07:07:00 -0400"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M" "Sat, 18 May 1991 17:28 CDT"
, p anyzone "%d %b %Y %T" "11 Apr 1991 12:02:01 GMT"
, p anyzone "%d-%b-%y %H:%M" "24-Mar-90 14:22 CST"
, p anyzone "%d %b %y, %T" "22 May 91, 16:31:37 EST"
, p anyzone "%d %b %Y %H:%M" "30 June 1991 17:15 -0400"
, p anyzone "%a, %d %b T %T" "Fri, 8 Feb T 09:49:39 EST"
-- special cases
, p (tzconst est) "%a %b %d %T EST %Y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EST 1983"
, p (tzconst est) "%a %b %d %T EST %y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EST 83"
, p (tzconst edt) "%a %b %d %T EDT %Y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EDT 1983"
, p (tzconst edt) "%a %b %d %T EDT %y" "Tue Jan 11 12:44:36 EDT 83"
, p (tzconst utc) "%a %b %d %T GMT %Y" "Thu Nov 1 23:14:37 GMT 1990"
, p (tzconst pdt) "%d %b %y %T -7" "11 Jun 91 15:41:21 -7"
-- dates with no timezone specified are guessed
, p nozone "%d %b %y %T" "9 Jan 90 09:33:59"
, p nozone "%d %b %Y %T" "10 APR 1990 05:25:28"
, p nozone "%a %b %d %T %Y" "Fri Feb 6 00:19:47 1981"
, p nozone "%a %b %d %T %y" "Fri Feb 6 00:19:47 81"
, p nozone "%Y-%m-%d %T" "1981-11-12 18:31:01"
, p nozone "%y-%m-%d %T" "81-11-12 18:31:01"
, p nozone "%a, %d %b %y %T" "Sat, 13 Apr 91 08:37:57"
, p nozone "%a, %d %b %Y %T" "Sun, 16 Jun 1991 13:23:02"
, p nozone "%d %b, %Y %T" "1 May, 1991 00:00:00"
, p nozone "%d %b %y %H:%M" "8 Jan 88 18:03"
, p nozone "%a, %d %b %y %H:%M" "Wed, 29 May 91 17:14"
, p nozone "1 %b %d %T %Y" "1 Jan 08 20:59:08 1991"
-- this has to come near the end, as it matches greedily
, g nozone "%a %b %d %T %Y (" "Wed Oct 27 17:02:46 1982 (Tuesday)"
, g nozone "%a, %d %b %y %T +" "Tue, 21 May 91 16:46:01 +22323328"
-- extract date from message-id headers
-- (used for messages with no Date field)
, g nozone "<%Y%b%d.%H%M%S." "<1989Jul6.214048.28313@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>"
(Parsing the often ambiguous, malformed, etc timezones was fun all its own too, of course.)
So olduse.net has been on the top of Hacker News, and Slashdotted, and bounced around the twittersphere since opening a few days ago.
There have been a quarter million hits to the web.
Our lastlogs are bulging with 50 thousand invididual logins
to the shell servers to run rtin via the web.
And 80000 individual reads of Usenet posts. Since there are only 784 posts on Usenet so far, each has been read an average of 100 times. That's possibly more than they were read the first time around, 30 years ago!
Thanks for your interest.
We're now able to handle the load well, and all but 30 posts have now
been successfully imported into the incoming news spool for uucp to
find over the next ten years.
For a while after launch, external NNTP was broken. It's fixed now.
Also, IPv6 NNTP is working now.
I've increased the number of users who can use the web viewer at one time, as the server is not noticing the load of 10 to 15.
OTOH, shellinabox has crashed twice. I have added a cron job to restart it for now.
News continues to flow in in realtime.
Thanks for all your interest! --Joey
As I write this, it's the morning of June 5th, 1981. A few people scattered across the US are waking up, going in to work, sitting down at their terminal with a coffee, and reading Usenet. Usenet is only getting a trickle of posts each day -- it's still in that period where it's easy to read every message posted to it.
Many things lie in Usenet's future. It's still running A-News, which doesn't even have a real From header yet. Later this year it will switch over to B-News, and volume will begin to increase. In 1987 there will be The great renaming. And of course in 1994, the first spam will be posted to Usenet.
But that's all a long way off, here in 1981. Right now, they're talking about 500 mb disk drives that only cost $38000. And rms is inciting flames about nuclear proliferation. And Postel is publishing an RFC for the new Mail Transfer Protocol.
Good morning, Usenet. Who knows what will come next in this fledgeling electronic communications medium!
a ten year real-time historical exhibit
This morning, I'm announcing a new site: Olduse.net
It's Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago. Planned to be available for the next ten years, unless I run out of inodes (again).
If you missed it the first time around, this is your chance to follow Usenet's flowering.
made possible by
- Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, Department of Zoology, who archived Usenet. Back when it was really uncool and really expensive. Our view onto Usenet is thus slightly centric to Canada and Zoology, but that's ok.
- David Wiseman, who hauled 141 magtapes in a pickup truck.
- Many who worked to rescue data off the tapes. Including from the deleted stuff at the ends.
- Rich Skrenta, who somehow got a copy of the archive out from under the Google borg. Although one of the tar files is truncated. Just saying.
- The creator of Telehack, who pointed me in the right direction, ending my multi-year quest to find the archive. And if you think this is neat, Telehack will blow you away.
- The developers of Haskell, which enabled me to whip up a B-News to C-News converter, a custom uucp, date parsers for every crazy date format ever used on Usenet, and suitible queue data structures in a rock solid, maintainable way, in 500 lines of code written over 12 hours. When I realized I also needed an A-News to B-News converter, I knew it was worth it to have done things right, because that took only 43 more lines, and worked 100% on the first run! My code repository for olduse.net is here.
PS: You can post to olduse.net, but it won't show up for at least 30 years.
blog feeds: