The alt.* heirarchy has arrived! So far only a few groups, like
alt.flame, alt.drugs, alt.cyberpunk. Looking forward to more!
After reading some of the articles in these newsgroups, I realized that while I have been busy with my mods and fixes, other enterprising hackers have been busy as well, and now fountains, spiders, spiderwebs, and ghod knows how many other things are in use at some sites.
The author of the program seems not to be on the net anymore, at least, there hasn't been any detectable sign of him for at least 2 years. Therefore....
PROPOSED: That we (net.hackers) consolidate all our mods to Hack, and.... That we release a 1.0.4 version of the game.
And so nethack truely begins.
Also a message in that thread mentioned that one of the original authors of hack (Jay Fenlason) was probably not working on it because he was employed by the GNU project. Interesting that GNU could have indirectly caused the formation of the nethack dev team.
Two hours and 16 minutes into Roguelike Radio Episode 84: Nethack after a lot of groaning about nethack design warts, I was surprised to hear a shout-out to olduse.net as a way to relive the early hack/nethack development.
Also, they pointed out that olduse.net is a pun. I had not realized that! At least not conciously..
Olduse.net is now past the Great Renaming!
While it was being discussed back in September, I only noticed it had happened when I fired up the news reader recently, after a news-fast over the holidays. There were suddenly lots of new groups to subscribe to, with the new hierarchy mixed in with the dead but not quite departed newsgroups.
174 comp.unix.questions
185 comp.unix.wizards
22 comp.unix.xenix
85 comp.windows.x
0 eunet.bugs.4bsd
0 fluke.micro
0 hp.msdos
0 ky.general
0 ky.news
0 micros
0 misc
After writing some code to delete empty groups, this mixture has now been cleaned up; the old groups are gone.
Post-Renaming, Usenet feels a more focused place. Great for information on a specific technical topic, but otherwise a tad boring in its new focused hierarchies.
The alt groups are coming! I hear they'll arrive sometime this year, and look forward to Usenet getting wild and wooly once more.
The GNU project has released its first major subsystem, the EMACS editor. -- http://article.olduse.net/194@encore.UUCP
I just got a copy of GNU emacs, and it is large. I am willing to post it to mod.sources, but it is HUGE (about 20 postings) -- http://article.olduse.net/729@genrad.UUCP
Can you imagine the expense of shipping 1MB of data between all net sites and of storing that 1MB on every sites disk -- http://article.olduse.net/483@hoxna.UUCP
If you wish to recover GNU emacs you can dial into our system and retrieve it. [..] The modem is 1200 Baud. [..] With the current performance of UUCP you will see a transfer rate of about 100 chars/second. Using this value you will see transfer times around 2 hours for GNUshar.Z to 8 hours for GNUtar. So, pick your medicine. -- http://article.olduse.net/203@encore.UUCP
Reading along in my favorite newsgroup, I saw "WARNING" and unexpectedly landed in a controversy about Censorship from Spaaace!
Primarily, the message is that, unless something is
done shortly, this newsgroup may not exist a year or two
from now. [...]
A few months ago, a group of network administrators got
together and decided to fund a project called "STARGATE".
Basicly, this was a sound idea. News sources would be
routed to the STARGATE transmitter which would beam the mes-
sages to a satellite which would, in turn, relay the mes-
sages to more localized network hubs, thus alleviating the
need for as many long distance calls. [...]
Unfortunately, the people who have promoted this scheme
could not leave well enough alone. They felt that the
volume of "garbage" flowing through the net was too high.
They felt that the carrier of these messages might be able
to be sued for possibly libelous messages. They felt that
this was their chance to play God and they took it. In
short, the new network will have no unmoderated news. [...]
Let the people who conceived of this know that it
is not appreciated. E-Mail bomb them. Flame them until
they drop. If you see them in public, spit on them. [...]
-- Frank Adrian
Wow! Digging into net.stargate, I see that Stargate plans to bounce the traffic off the Galaxy I satellite, hidden in the vertical interval of a TV station. Some more detail here.
This proposed change is not being received well by the net at large.
I agree that lots of Usenet submissions are trash. Everything is trash
to somebody. What I don't want is centralized control. That's the ONE
thing that makes Usenet different from every other network, and it's a
valuable difference.
-- John Gilmore
Some of the responses from Usenet admins are also very interesting, as they provide a glimpse into what's involved in keeping the current network running, and continuing to scale up.
Because we have to deal with the net on a day to day (sometimes hour
to hour basis) and talk to a LOT of the people who run the net, I think we
have a different view of the net than the people who simply have the
priviledge of using the damn thing. [...]
I mean, seriously-- if you haven't
spent months bickering with the carriers lawyers, how in the HELL can you
suggest seriously that we really don't need moderators or that we can do it
in software?
If you people seriously want to try to get along without a group of
overworked and harried people who happen to spend a lot of time keeping
this thing running so you can bitch at us about it, then fine. Let me know.
I'll rmgroup mod.singles, I'll unsubscribe to net.news, and I'll laugh if
and when the system dies. We can cancel Stargate, we can watch the
backbones start restricting news, the software can get flakey, and, if you
could get it through the garbage, everyone who is yelling at the fascists
for trying to do a thankless job would spend just as much time yelling at
us for letting it fall apart. I don't know about the rest of them, but I
am sometimes tempted to just step back and watch the damn thing die.
This is another vote in favour of some source of moderated news -
either via stargate or some other means. While at Waterloo, I've
watched the information flow on USENET grow from under 1Mb/week to its
current level of over 4Mb/week. I used to read almost everything that
came in (except info-cpm, remember that?), now I read only a small
fraction, and the valuable stuff is getting scarcer.
I have not had a lot of time lately to read olduse.net, but it's still going strong.
Looking at the logs, a hundred or so people connect to the NNTP server each month, and some use it frequently, month after month. It's nice to know people are really getting into following olduse.net.
Thousands more visit the website each month. Just this month, it popped back up on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8780135 And my shell server got overloaded with 832 concurrent users. I have set up two more shell servers to spread the load.
So, four years in, olduse.net is continuing to be interesting to people. I had wondered if anyone would stick around for the middle years.
As I mentioned, my own reading habits on olduse.net have become sporadic, generally once or twice a month. Partly this is because there's so much more activity now. I was reading nearly every post back in A-news days, but as volume picked up, I started mostly reading only a few newsgroups that were particularly interesting to me (net.games.rogue, net.sources, hacknews, net.flame, etc), with random glances at others. There's still only 800 newsgroups, and many are not very active, so I have still been subscribing to them all.
What are your olduse.net reading habits like?
net.games.rogue is abuzz about a new game that has appeared.. hack!
http://article.olduse.net/6238@mcvax.UUCP
Seems that many sites missed one or another of the 15 posts of the source to hack. Here we at olduse.net offer the true 1985 experience, since file 15/15 didn't propigate to our site either.
I have managed to get many of the source files I have to build on a modern Linux system, but not all of them. The tty handling code defeated me.
Was reading net.games.rogue today, and:
From: dim@cbuxc.UUCP (Dennis McKiernan)
Subject: Author looking for feedback on The Iron Tower Trilogy.
Newsgroups: net.books,net.sf-lovers,net.games,net.games.frp,net.games.rogue,net.wanted
-- http://article.olduse.net/113@cbuxc.UUCP
Is posting this to the rogue newsgroup inspired, or almost some kind of proto-spam? You decide..
(BTW Dennis, I quite enjoyed your trilogy.)
If RMS was reading oldusenet in the last 24 hours, as he fine-tuned the wording of his famous announcement, here are two things he would have seen:
Maryland software distribution
A Lisp system, including a windowing system.
This flexible package allows convenient management of multiple contexts on the screen and runs on ordinary character display terminals as well as bit-mapped displays.
For just $100, but check out the license:
In exchange for the Maryland software tape, I certify to the
following:
a. I will not use any of the Maryland software distribution in a
commercial product without obtaining permission from Maryland
first.
b. I will keep the Maryland copyright notices in the source code,
and acknowledge the source of the software in any use I make of
it.
c. I will not redistribute this software to anyone without permission
from Maryland first.
d. I will keep Maryland informed of any bug fixes.
e. I am the appropriate person at my site who can make guarantees a-d.
No, it's not Linux. ;) But it is an improved Unix kernel for the PDP-11.
And so nine months ago we (oops, sorry, 'we' are Professor Robert Michael Owens, John Irwin, and David Eckhardt) set out to transform version 7 into something useable. To make a long story short, we think we've done so. So now we have considered trying to market/give-away our UNIX. Like 4.1, it would require a V7 license.
That's an existing AT&T Unix license, required to see the new kernel source code that these guys are otherwise mostly ready to give away to anyone with interest.
I'm surprised these popped up in just the past 24 hours. They are not the first such posts on Usenet of course. But the proprietary software is certianly coming thick and fast in the hours before RMS began to change everything!
I'm sure that, as RMS was reading Usenet (and Arpanet) before this, he saw much more than this. He'd have seen a trend toward free sharing of code, enabled on an unprecedented level by the new networks. And at the same time he'd have seen each site trying to piece together their own Unix from software they licenced and hints posted on the net. He'd have seen the hacker ethos exploding, at the same time that a public who had just recently been exposed to "hacking" in War Games started to think they were all criminals. He'd have seen so, so much potential, hobbled on technical and social and legal levels.
And more than anyone else, he did something about it. In 1 hour from now you
can see what, in the net.unix-wizards newsgroup on nntp.olduse.net.
Update:
A little grep has told me that RMS is going to announce something special on olduse.net in two weeks time, on 27 September 1983. Best not to speculate about the details, but this announcement will be something people are still talking about thirty years later. So it's an event you and your news reader won't want to miss.
I have set up an IRC channel #olduse.net on FreeNode, and we'll see who first spots the post!
David suggests that smileys are pretty new.
Wow! The ":-)" notation was suggested just about three mionths ago, and I had thought that it was spreading SLOWLY. Just how fast is this network growing, anyway?
According to Paul, they're not so new.
As I recall, it was started last summer. Seems as though there was a whole list of 'um made then too . . .
:-} :-{ 8-) 6-) 9-) :-(
Interesting, I have not encountered the 6 and 9 variants on the modern net. But anyway, when was the first smiley posted to Usenet? It was first mentioned in a post from James Morris to the human-nets list, gatewayed from arpanet to usenet in November 1982.
Because you can't see the person who is sending you electronic
mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or
joking. Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for
annotating one's messages to overcome this problem. If you turn
your head sideways to look at the three characters :-) they look
sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a
message that says "Have you stopped beating your wife?:-)" you
know they are joking. If they say "I need to talk to you :-(",
be prepared for trouble.
Since Scott's original proposal, many further symbols have been
proposed here:
(:-) for messages dealing with bicycle helmets
@= for messages dealing with nuclear war
<:-) for dumb questions
oo for somebody's head-lights are on messages
o>-<|= for messages of interest to women
~= a candle, to annotate flaming messages
So you see, bit-map displays are really quite unnecessary :->
(This page has the details of Scott Fahlman's original post, which was not made to Usenet but to a BBS, and the digital archeology involved in retrieving it from tape in 2002.)
Soon after that post, a smiley was used in a direct post to usenet by John Woods:
Mental phenomena are easy to demonstrate, to wit: Place your phone in the middle of your desk. Think about your phone for a while. Eventually, it will ring. See how easy it is? While it is ringing, think about making it stop, and soon it will.
:-)
And how fast did the smiley spread from this first introduction on Usenet? Here's a rough histrogram, although of course Usenet traffic levels are also generally increasing in this period.
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It's summer movie season, and here's another review for a movie you might recognise. But while you probably see this movie in a pretty good light, as an influential and better than average depiction of computer hacking .. the Flaming review of Wargames has a different take:
In my humble opinion, the film "Wargames" is a good example of the sort of "pseudo-technical" crap that gives people unrealistically negative views of computers and the people who work with them.
I particularly liked this part, which highlighted a problem with War Games that is no longer apparent from our vantage point:
typical silliness of data rates much faster than possible with the modems in use
Meanwhile, I'm about ready for the 'net to stop talking about Star Wars, how about you?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
__________STAR WARS______________________________
/-\ /-- /--\ / \ /-\ /\ \ /\ /-- /--\ /-\
\-/ |-- || | | \-/ | \ | OF | |-- | | |
| \ \-- || \_/ | \ | \| THE | \-- \__/ \-/
-------------------------------|-----------------
\_/
^
/ \
. |||
.. |||
. |||
. |||
. |||
. . |||
. .. .. . |||
. |||
. . . |||
. |||
. . . . |||
. \---/
. . . OOO /-|
. . OOOOO //-|
. . OOO |/--\
. . . . . .. |||-\\
. . . . . . || ||
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Starring
MARK HAMILL - HARRISON FORD - CARRIE FISHER
BILLY DEE WILLIAMS - ANTHONY DANIELS as c3po
Co-starring David Prowse - Kenny Baker - Peter Mathew - Frank Oz
Directed by RICHARD MARQUAND Produced by HOWARD KAZANJIAN Story by GORGE LUCAS
Screeplay by LAWRENCE KASDAN and GEORGE LUCAS
It's time for Return of the Jedi reviews on olduse.net!
Here's one by none other than Gene Spafford.
If you're still unsure about going to see it, here's a longer review.
The film was fantastic, special effects out did themselves, you can't tell where they used the computer graphics for scenery because it all melded in so well
.. I'm not sure about those muppets though.
Usenet is branching out internationally, with some sites in Europe already, and now, Australia_joins_USENET
Data is actually collected at sdchema and transferred
every week or so to a mag tape which is then sent airmail
to the department of Computer Science at the University
of Sydney in Australia where it is sent into the
Australian network. It is a slow but cheap way of
sending news, mail and files to Australian sites.
Ok, ok. I'm Lady Arwen. Enough already.
An interesting admission from the inventor of Minix, but is it true? I'm far from convinced after going back over the Lady Arwin kerfluffle.
One of her first messages, on net.philosophy about fear of death stuck in my head. But I barely noticed the "Arwen" signature, it was simply well written, and its followup too. And it resonated interestingly across 30 years; I wondered if the author's flame had guttered out.
Maybe if I'd noticed the "Lady Arwian of U.C.S.D." signature on some of her other posts, I'd have been more stuck by the name, but I doubt it. Just someone in the SCA surely? Anyhow, she's posted a lot, in the top ten by volume in February. A random sampling across the groups:
So, the reaction from the net to this poster, in the "Unmask Lady Arwin" thread makes me a bit uncomfortable (due to probably some sexism), but is also rather interesting. Some wonder if this person is really female. Others seem struck by what's apparently some form of pseudonym, which is a bit uncommon on Usenet in 1983. Others seem to want to form a fan club for this somethat prolific and interesting poster, which has not really happened on Usenet before either, but surely will happen again.
This post is perhaps the most amusing reaction:
1. It is a well-known fact that there are many AI projects running on the net, one of them being floyd!trb. Floyd!trb has just claimed to be Lady Arwen. 2. There is an expert system called R1 produced at CMU which configures Vaxen. Clearly, Arwen is a punning form of R1. My conclusion (and conclusions differing from mine may be directed to /dev/null) is that Lady Arwen is a cloned version of the TRB program which is being developed at UCB and which bears the same relationship (better) to TRB that Berkely Un*x bears to Bell Un*x. The "Lady" nomenclature merely indicates that the gender bit has been toggled from 0 to 1 (or 1 to 0, let's not quibble about which).
.. Nah, that's not right. I figured it all out!
In other news, punch card services discontinued at BTL...
"USENET interchanged standard posted" is a fascinating bit of history. Here we have the initial rationalle for what became the "modern" Usenet news format, based on RFC-822.
The reason for having a standard is that there are now five separate, full fledged implementations of news, all talking to each other, and up until now the only specification for how sites should communicate has been "whatever doesn't break the code".
Don't know about you, but I'm eagerly looking forward to newsgroup names longer than 14 characters and moderated newsgroups.
But what I'm most eagerly looking forward to is the References header, which will allow threading of messages, with full nested threads. Threads have mostly had to be followed manually and by heuristics so far, so that'll be really nice!
(I am less looking forward to the new Expires header, since anything posted with such a header in 1983 will likely have expired already by the time I get around to reading it.)
olduse.net now expires old articles after 60 days. This should provide a better view of how Usenet looks now, without the accumulated cruft from A-news days a year or two ago.
A peek at the development of the 286:
As far as the 286 is concerned, as of this date, nobody's even seen a fully functional one. The A-step samples out do not have the memory managment working yet and there are some pretty strange things happening with interrupts. And the darned thing won't run correctly with interrupts at 8 Mhz; you have to decrease the clock speed to about 7.5 Mhz. Intel's due to sample the B-step parts later on this month.
First mention of AIDS on Usenet. (Although not the first time the word appeared there; there was earlier an unfortunately named host named AIDS-UNIX on Usenet.)
A Letter from Xanadu is an interesting look inside Ted Nelson's Xandu project.
With the Sun workstation's bit map graphics capability, we can now start working out he best way to visually display links.
That sounds almost like it's 1992 and the web is being built.. but no, it's a decade earlier.
"Three-sets", the part of the system which allows a programmer to include information about a link other than where it connects to, are now implemented.
And, of course, tried to do things that are still not available on the web today.
We recently fed a document of .75 megabytes into the system. Linkages within this document and from others have been made and tested; this is demonstrable proof that the Xanadu Hypertext System can handle large databases without degrading response time.
Ah, it's still 1982 after all!
Back in 1994 when I was in college, I remember seeing versions of "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette", and as I recall I wrote a paper for a Sociology class citing it as an example of ways Usenet maintained its culture. The irony of course, was that this was already in year two of The September that Never Ended.
But back then, I was missing another important piece of the puzzle that I stumbled over today in my buldging olduse.net feed, an article titled "Emily Post on Usenet Etiquette"
This "Emily Post" well predates Brad Templeton's better known "Emily Postnews", and it's obvious that the latter was written as a parody of it.
Take this question in "Emily Post":
- "Where does 'fubar' come from?"
In my opinion the best answer seems to be "Fouled up beyond
all recognition." There are lots of versions of this
acronym, in particular "Fouled" is usually replaced by a
less polite word. "foobar", "foo" and "bar" are all
derived from "fubar." (See discussion of net.jokes for the
reason I use the polite word.)
Which inspired this snark in "Emily Postnews":
Q: What does foobar stand for? A: It stands for you, dear.
This difference in tone between the formal, clear, and staid "Emily Post", and the informal, referential, and ironic "Emily Postnews" is one of the things I'm most interested in seeing evolve as Usenet grows its own culture.
And so I was most interested to see this response to "Emily Post", which articulates the problem Usenet is struggling with in 1982 so well:
Here we have a new media which is not quite a publication (such as a memo, book or newspaper), not quite a conversation (there is a definite time lag between messages), and not quite a "semi-public forum" as some people would have you believe. The one criticism of the paper is that it implied to me that it was socially unacceptable to use the net conversationally [...]
The turtles are just red (or blue if partially submerged) ovals, but the logs and frogs look good, and the motion of things to the left or right is very smooth.
-- review
An updated map of Usenet, using data from Karen and Mark Horton. There are now 662 hosts on Usenet.
See also: current usenet map
Learning of the death of Haskell Curry from a post on net.applic, I'm unexpectedly saddened by a 30 year old event.
The only computing figure so well respected that not only his last name is used to refer to a common programming language capability, "currying"; but his fist name is also used, for the haskell language. (olduse.net is brought to you by some haskell code.)
Some more interesting tidbits about him, his father, and Alaxander Graham Bell in this post.
I got involved in the things that bear his name well after his time, and so never thought to mourn him. But reading the traces of the event on olduse.net, I realize that I'll never get to see him post there, like I see Dennis Ritchie from time to time. A new experience of loss.
The utzoo usenet archives surely survived to get to us because of the care taken to archive them all along the way. We even have details of archival work recorded inside the archives, like today's post about the A-news archives being moved to two redundant archive tapes.
That post counts "nearly 11000 articles". Thirty years later, so do I:
utzoo-usenet/news001f1>find -type f|wc -l
10918
Unfortunatly, the post does not give the total number of bytes of A-news that were archived, although it does mention they had used 28000 blocks of disk space. So it's hard to tell if we have a complete set of A-news.
We know the B-news set is incomplete; at some point they ran out of tapes and overwrote some old B-news archives with newer data, although some of the old data was recovered from the end of the tapes.
My olduse.net exhibit has now finished replaying the first year of historical Usenet posts from 30 years ago, in real time.
That was only twelve thousand messages, probably less than many people get on Facebook in a year.. but if you read along this year, you probably have a much better feel for what early Usenet was like. If you didn't, it's not too early to start, 9 years of Usenet's flowering lie ahead.
I don't know how many people followed along. I read .. not every message, but a large fraction of them. I see 40 or so unique NNTP connections per day, and some seem to stick around and read for quite a while, so I'm guessing there might be a few hundred people following on a weekly basis.
If you're not one of them, and don't read our olduse.net blog, here are a few of the year's highlights:
- After announcing the exhibit
it hit all the big tech sites like Hacker News and Slashdot, and
Boing Boing. A quarter million people loaded the front page. For a while
every one of those involved a login to my server to run
tin. I have some really amusing who listings. Every post available initially was read an average of 100 times, which was probably more than they were read the first go around. - Beautiful ascii art usenet maps were posted as the network mushroomed; I collected them all. In a time-delayed collaboration with Mark, I produced a more modern version.
- We watched sites struggle with the growth of usenet, and followed along as B-news was developed and deployed.
- In 2011, Dennis Richie passed. We still enjoy his wit and insight on olduse.net.
- We enjoyed the first posts of things like The Hacker's Dictionary and DEC Wars.
- Some source code posted to usenet still compiles. I haven't found anything to add to Debian, yet. :)
I will probably be expiring the first year's messages before too long, to have a more uncluttered view. So if you wanted to read them, hurry up!
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.
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
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.
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!)
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!
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.
April 1986 map of backbone sites only:
Here is the backbone as of 1 April 1986:
olduse.net
|
(wormhole to 2016)
|
cbosgd-----------------------------------clyde---------watmath--------utzoo
| | |
ihnp4-------alberta------ubc-vision burl linus
| \ | | |
| mgnetp uw-beaver ulysses--------------bellcore |
| | \ |
| tektronix-----------------------------------decvax
| | / |
qantel---------------------\ | /---------oliveb-----glacier-----decwrl |
| \|/ |
| kddlab----------------hplabs-------sdcrdcf |
| | | | |
| | | sdcsvax |
| | (see below) hao | |
| | / | drillsys |
| |/ | | |
| mcvax-----------------seismo--------gatech----------akgua---------mcnc
| /|\ |
lll-lcc-----lll-crg---------/ | \---------cmcl2-----------------------philabs
|
munnari
This is the European backbone (mcvax feeds all of them):
penet enea diku unido penet -> Finland
| \ | / enea -> Sweden
| \ | / diku -> Denmark
| \ | / unido -> W. Germany
| \ | / vmucnam -> France
vmucnam--+----------mcvax------cernvax mcvax -> Netherlands
| / | \ cernvax -> Switzerland
| / | \ ukc -> Great Britain
| / | \ prlb2 -> Belgium
| / | \ i2unix -> Italy
vmars ukc prlb2 i2unix vmars -> Austria
(Shout out to anon.penet.fi which penet later provided! --Joey)
The map is up to 519 sites in North America plus 29 sites in Europe.
and 1 in Australia. It is becoming increasingly three-dimensional.
Because of this, there is one crossover on the map, as well as a number
(16) of connections that are keyed in with numbers (so that (1) connects
to (1) and so on).
Reading the map: -, |, and + indicate connections. Lines never pass
through a +, which always indicate where the connecting line ends or
changes direction. Logical buses are represented by =. This means
that a site such as hplabs is indicated by the entire string of
characters as follows: +====+=hao===+====+.
olduse.net
\
(wormhole to 2013)
USENET LOGICAL MAP - July 10,1983 \ Karen Shannon (sun!kas)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
orstcs kirk ssovax--interlab ism750 ism780 images ico hscfvax hscvax mit-eddie--mit-vax--(3) \ utcsstat utecfa trigraph munodie watcecit uw70 auvax
| | | | | | | | | | | \ | | | | | | |
arizona denelcor | hp-cvd icalqa--omsvax cfib--+=====+==ima==+=====+-----n44a--wjh12-----genrad--grkermit--masscomp \ +==+==utcsrgv=====+----garfield wateng uw-vlsi--uw-june (16) mprvaxa alberta
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | \ | | | | | |
kpno csu-cs--hp-dcd--hp-pcd (9) | aus86 (11) inmet imd ipa | rayssd--brunix--foxvax1 | kobold--orc dciem-utzoo---------watmath------------watdaisy teltone--+==uw-beaver==+--ubc-vision
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+====+=hao===+====+--+=+===+=+=hplabs==========+-----sri-unix-----cca--------------------------+=+=+=====+===linus======+======+ hcr watarts watcgl uvicctr--ssc-vax | ubc-medgen |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
(5) cires | | | oliveb hpda------+ hplabsc yale-comix | csin unh vortex wivax | security--vaxine | cg-d cwrunix--cwruecmp--medman microsoft--fluke--oz (13) sfucmpt
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
opus--nbires | | hplabsb hpdb--hpdc | twg packet +===+======+======+=====+========+===+=====decvax=========|===+=================+============+==+==========+===================+===========+
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
utastro--ut-ngp | | avsdF hptabu | | wdl1 sco | | flairvax | bmcg--felix sdchema noscvax | sbcs rdin sunrise micomz | | twin40--unc-c mi-cec--idis--pitt--dri0 | adiron
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
nsc--menlo70 | avsdS--atd--dsd--fortune------amd70 | | ios | (9)--sdcrdcf-------------+==sdcsvax===+--+===+=philabs====+----micomvax | | dvamc--+=====+===mcnc===++===+---+===duke+=+--phs
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
varian syteka--sytek | avsdT p500vax--megatest--sun--decwrl--qubix | trw-unix--scgvaxd sdccsu3 | | (12) | nybcb rocky2 | | ikonas (10)--ncsu tucc--+unc+ (2) ucf-cs--fau
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
(15)--+===+=======zehntel====================+ ubvax altos86 turtlevax | trwspf trwspp sdcatta--sdcattb | rna--+====+=cmcl2+=+--cmcl1 | | uvacs ecs brl-bmd uf-che
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
zinfandel zps | (13) tekid tekcad +------------+ ucsfcgl | | sdcarl | | lanl-a esquire | | ied102 udrelay
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
bronze--+==tekmdp==+--+====+=+==tektronix+==+==+----ucbcad--+====ucbvax=+====+ phonlab-------sdcsla unm-ivax cubs45 | | ittral ndcuts qumix
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
crimson dadla iddic tekchips reed | tekecs ucbesvax ucbtopaz unmvax nmtvax | +====+==ittvax=======+--bunker--bunkerb
| | | | | | | | | | |
dadla-a | | tekgds | sequel--ogcvax--metheus--cdi populi cda5d llkp03 hound houx[j,h,s,v] | wxlvax dcdwest sii--hei44
| | | | | | | | |
dadla-b--+ dadla-d teklabs hogpd (11) hocsf--hocs[d-e,g-k,t] wb2---houxz--wbux5 whuxk houxa houxk--houxw hou2[a-b] houx[c-d,i,l,r,u,y] |
| | | | | | | | | | |
(4) eisx--npoiv--npois--------+=====+====hogpc+========+---------------------+======+=====++======+====houxm====+=====++====+=====+--houem |
| | | | | | | | |
whuxlb--pyuxll--abnjh astrovax (8) (6) cbrap cbosg houx[b,e,g,n,o-q,t] uofm-cv--mb2c (7) gatech---msdc--(10) hocda (8) houxf |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
gummo pyuxqq princeton | osu-dbs--+====+==cbosgd=+====+--mddc hfhrv--mb2b bpa--sb6--emory itm (2) | machaids--5941ux |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| pyuxk | circe--ulysses--mhuxa----mhuxi cbscd5 nscs (1) scbhq--+===+=sb1====+--+=====burl=+===+--spanky--alfalfa |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | ----------------------------------------------------
| pyuxvv | | pyuxjj pyuxcc | aluxz | cbscc cbrmc att3--ll1--ll1b mgweed (14) clyde | tpsa hou5b | | Additional Connections: |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| +=====+==+===pyuxi===+===+--mhuxm | | mork-cb tty3b--+==otuxa==+--+=====+=we13======+ hou5d--hou5a odin | | (1) cbosgd--ihnp4 |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (2) duke--burl |
| u1100a pyuxss pyuxhh | pyuxl | mhuxd | | nwuxd inuxb inuxd we53--kcwin uniq hou5e--hou5f--orion--houca | | (3) eagle--mit-vax |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | (4) floyd--whuxlb |
| u1100s pyuxdd--pyuxnn mhuxv | | uicsg ccvaxa moria inuxa--+=+======inuxc======+--ixn5c hou5c ariel--houti---(6) | | (5) hao--seismo |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (6) hogpc--houca and hogpc--houti |
| pyuxmm mhuxr mhuxj | uicsl--+==+=uiucdcs====+------------pur-ee--iuvax--isrnix inuxe | tesla | pegasus--maxvax | | (7) houxm--ihnp4 |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | (8) houxm--mhuxa |
| research mhuxh----mhuxt uiucuxc--uiucsrl parsec | ecn-pa--ecn-pc--ecn-ed | cornell----vax135--------floyd-------+ | | (9) hplabs--sdcrdcf |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | (10) ncsu--msdc |
| rabbit--alice allegra hlexa--hlhop | uiuceml ctvax minn-ua | ecn-ec pucc-i | (16) (4) | | | (11) omsvax--ogcvax |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | (12) philabs--seismo |
| +====+==+==+====+=eagle================+ trsvax umn-cs purdue-----pucc-h--pur-phy | cvl--umcp-cs--aplvax | | | (13) tektronix--decvax and tektronix--uw-beaver |
| | | | | | | | | | | (14) we13--ihnp4 |
| | mh3bs (3) rocks34--rocksvax--sunybcs burdvax--psuvax stolaf ncrday--cincy (15) | +-rlgvax dvlcn slinac | | | (15) zehntel--ihnp4 |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (16) uw-beaver--cornell |
| | mhtsa crystal--uwvax | tropix ritvp presby psupdp1 +===============ihnp4====+=+======+ | uf-cgrl sask--hssg40--adec23 | | ----------------------------------------------------
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | wheps electrolux | rochester--ritcv--ccieng5 | (5) (12) (1) cdlncch--laidbak (14) (7) | beesvax--utah-cs--utah-gr--pwa-b | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | zeppo cit-vax--+==+======+============seismo====+===+=======+----------------------------------------------+ | | |
| | | | | | |
+===+====+=========================================+========================================harpo===================================+====================+=+
EUROPE
________________________________________________________________________________
North American Map
|
philabs
|
hirst1 ru-cc44 west44 | ibt sara70
| | | | | |
| ru-cs44 root44 vu44 | diku nlgvax | vmucnam
| | | | | | | | |
comet--+======ukc======+=====+-----+=mcvax=+=+===+====+====+--vub
| | | | | | | |
logica--+===edcaad===+ regi | dutesta | zti1 | mcpdp45
| | | | |
| +=edmiru=+ | philmds uvapsy mcpdp34
| | | |
edee--edai--edmrc
| |
+===glasgow==+--glhocus
AUSTRALIA
________________________________________________________________________________
basservax--sdchema--North American Map
(australia)
IHNP4 - Leaf nodes
________________________________________________________________________________
ihtnt ihux[a-b,e-f,h-x] ihps[1-4] iwlc[5-8] ixhte ih1ap
| | | | | |
ihldt | ihnet ihnss ihpad | ih4ep | ihnp1 | ihnp3 |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
ihn5i--+===+==+===+======+====ihnp4=+===+====+====+===+===+===+--ihu1[e-f]
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| ihn5l ihlts | ihtpa | ihhfl | ihu1e | ihu1f |
| | | | | |
iwsl[1-7] ixn5[d-h,k,o] iwu1[a-d] ihima ihhfl iheds
DRUX* (Currently isolated)
________________________________________________________________________________
druxs--drux[h-r,t-z]
USENET LOGICAL MAP - April 2, 1983 Karen Shannon (sun!kas)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- olduse.net
az70 aus86 omsvax orstcs kirk ism750 n44a images ico alberta--ubc-vision--sfucmpt wjh12--foxvax1 utcsstat--utcsrgv--trigraph /
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | (wormhole
arizona ssovax--+=icalqa=+ hp-pcd--hp-cvd cfib--+=====+==ima==+=====+ ubc-medgen | mprvaxa grkermit--genrad--mitccc wateng--watdaisy | dciem / to 2013)
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | /
kpno nbires--cires | | hplabsb hplabsc inmet imd ipa | ism780 teltone--uw-beaver--uw-june--uw70 | linus--security watmath---+==utzoo==+
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
cvl +====+=hao=======+=+--+===hplabs+=+========+-----sri-unix-------cca--csin microsoft--fluke--vax1 uw-vlsi | wivax vaxine watarts watcgl hcr |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
rlgvax--+ | crystal | csu-cs hpda-------+ brunix--rayssd | cg-d | ssc-vax vax2 vortex unh | | medman--cwruecmp--cwrunix | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
presby--seismo--uwvax | hpdb--hpdc | yale-comix--+===+==+===+========++=============+=====+=decvax=+===+============+===============+===+=====+
| | | | | | | | | | |
burdvax | rocksvax | avsdF hptabu | twg | sultan | ittapp | ndcuts tpdcvax twin40--web40 mi-cec--idis--pitt--dri0 | adiron |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
ritcv--rochester menlo70 avsdS--atd--dsd--fortune--wdl1 | | +====ittvax==+=====+--bunker ikonas--+===+=mcnc=+=+==+---+====duke+==+--phs |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
rocks34 syteka--sytek avsdT p500vax--megatest--sun--decwrl--amd70 | qumix sii dcdwest wxlvax uvacs--ncsu tucc--+unc+ ucf-cs--uf-che |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
varian--zehntel--zps ubvax altos86 | flairvax | trwspf trwspp +=====sdcsvax===+--sdchema msdc ecs brl-bmd fau |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
crimson | tekchips tekid turtlevax | trw-unix--+ | sdcsla | philabs--+ emory udrelay unm-ivax--nmtvax |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
bronze--tekmdp----+=======tektronix==+=======+--ucbcad--+====ucbvax======+ sdcrdcf--sdccsu3 phonlab | micomvax | cmcl1 nybcb rocky2 lanl-a cubs45 |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
dadla-a iddic reed--teklabs tekcad populi | ucbonyx bmcg sdcattb--sdcatta noscvax +===+====cmcl2=====+======+---esquire---+|
| | | | | | ||
dadla-b--dadla tektinker sequel--ogcvax--metheus--cdi ucsfcgl maxvax sdcarl tpsa--spanky e f g j (hocs*) | sbcs ||
| | | | | | | | | ||
dadla-d u1100s----------------------------u1100a pegasus 5941ux--machaids--hocda d--+=hocsb==+--k | peri ||
| | | | | | | | ||
+======================|==npois============+-------------+=========+=======houxm=====+ (houx*) q r y +==houxz===+=+----hou5d--hou5a +===floyd====+||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| whuxlb | wbux5 sescent | cbosg whuxk hogpb----------b--+==+houxa+==+--+=houxi==+--p ihps3 hou5e vax135 |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |||
npoiv------------eisx--pyuxbb osu-dbs--cbosgd--nscs---rmc hogpc v----h--j--k c f o hound uofm-cv npoiv hou5c | cornell |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| | abnjh--pyuxll | mhuxd mhuxi--aluxz mork-cb t--n bpa--sb6 scbhq +---mb2b--uofm-hfh hou5f--hou5b | uw-beaver |||
| | | | | | | | | | |||
| | pyuxmm--pyuxdd burl--mhuxv--mhuxj s att3--ll1--+====sb1===+--burl--kcwin--we53 houxe orion--ariel |||
| | | | | | | | | | | |||
| | pyuxcc--+==pyuxjj==+--mhuxm | +===+==otuxa=======+---+====we13===+-----------+=lime=+----houti--houca |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| | pyuxk------pyuxl | | we04-3b nwuxc inuxa inuxb inuxd uniq hoh-2 houxg deimos |||
| | | | | | | | | | | |||
| | pyuxss pyuxvv | | uicsg uiuccsl moria princeton +=====+==inuxc======+----ixn5c--druxs--drux[h-r,t-z] |||
| | | | | | | | | |||
| | research hlexa--bwkna--mhuxh | uicsl--+==+=uiucdcs====+------------pur-ee--iuvax--isrnix | iwlc8 iwsl1 |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| | | rabbit mhb5c--+=mhuxa=+ | uiucuxc--uiuceml parsec minn-ua | ecn-pa--ecn-pb--ecn-ed | iwlc7--iwsl3--iwsl2 |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| +--alice princeton--mhb5b mhuxt----+ uiucsrl ihtnt ctvax umn-cs purdue--------pucc-h--pur-phy | ihps2----iwsl4--iwlc6 |||
| | | | | | | | | | | |||
| mhtsa-----+====eagle=======+====+ ihlpb ihldt ihps1 stolaf ncrday--cincy pucc-i ihhfl | | iwsl5 iwsl6 |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| mh3bs allegra--psuvax mit-vax | iham1 ihlts | ixlpa | ixn5k | ihps3 | ihnss ixn5h iheds ihn5i | | | ihuxk--ih1ap |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| dvlcn slinac masscomp | +======+===+===+===+===+===+=====+=+=+=+==+=+=+===++==+===+===+==+=+=ihnp4=======+===+======+ |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |||
| wheps psi sask--hssg40--adec23 | ihnet ihps4 ixlpc | ihwld | | ihpad | ixlpb | ixn5e ihtpa | ihux[a-j,l-u,w,x] |||
| | | | | | | | | | | |||
| zeppo utah-cs--utah-gr--pwa-b | inmet--esquire ihnp1 ih4ep ixn5d ihima ixn5c cdlncch--laidbak--trsvax |||
| | | | | |||
+===+========+=======================+===+======================================harpo==================================================================+++
EUROPE
________________________________________________________________________________
North American Map
|
philabs
|
regi vu44 | diku--ibt edcaad
| | | | |
ukc--+==+=mcvax=+=====+--edee--edmiru
| |
vub dutestaa
The map is up to 448 sites in North America plus 11 sites in Europe.
It is becoming increasingly three-dimensional. Because of this, there
is one crossover on the map, as well as seven sites that appear twice.
Those sites are: burl, esquire, ihps3, inmet, npoiv, princeton, and
uw-beaver.
Reading the map: -, |, and + indicate connections. Lines never pass
through a +, which always indicate where the connecting line ends or
changes direction. Logical buses are represented by =. This means
that a site such as hplabs is indicated by the entire string of
characters as follows: +===hplabs+=+========+.
USENET Logical Map - October 28, 1982 Karen Shannon (sun!kas)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
olduse.net
|
ssovax gsp86 omsvax ism750 images ico ubc-vision fluke--ssc-vax grkermit | utcsstat--utcsrgv--trigraph
| | | | | | | | | (wormhole |
rascal--+====intelqa===+ orstcs hpda2 n44a--+====+=ima====+ uw-beaver--microsoft genradbolton to 2012)--==utzoo==--watmath--watarts
| | | | | | | | | | | |
kpno csu-cs | hp-pcd hpda imd ipa | ism780 uw-june | cwrunix--cwruecmp | sultan wivax hcr | cg-d yale-comix
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
arizona nsc--menlo70----hao----+===hplabs===+--sri-unix---------cca---+======+========+====+======decvax==+====+====+=======+========+===+=====+==+=======+
| | | | | | | | | |
psi--gi------------sytek cires atd--dsd--fortune ubvax csin | | ittapp | bunker qumix mi-cec--idis--pitt ikonas adiron | ucf-cs |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
varian--zehntel amd70--megatest-----sun--decwrl | +===ittvax=+=====+ ncsu--+=====mcnc=====+---+==+==duke=+======+|
| | | | | | | | | | | ||
metheus--ogcvax | tekid tekcad ucbarpa ucb ucbernie altos86 | tpdcvax sii | dcdwest noscvax web40 brl-bmd--+unc+--tucc phs ||
| | | | | | | | | | | | ||
azure--tekmdp--+===+=teklabs===+---ucbcad--+=====+=+====+===ucbvax===+==========+ sdchema--+====sdcsvax===+ nybca udrelay ||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||
dadla-a--dadla | tekcrd | reed populi ucbonyx ucbopt | ucsfcgl sdccsu3 | philabs nybcb acf2 rocky2 cubs45 ||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||
dadla-b | tekchips iddic bio u1100s-------------|---------------+ sdcattb--sdcatta +======+==+=cmcl2=====+======+-----esquire----------+||
| | | | | | | | | |||
dadla-d tektinker | eiss | | sdcarl phonlab e f g lanl-a sbcs--peri--+=======floyd===+=====+|||
| | | | | | | | ||||
desoto--pyuxdd--pyuxbb--eisx--vtxa | | (houx*) d--hocsb--j hou5d--hou5a machaids--5941ux | ||||
| | | | | | | | | | ||||
+=================npoiv==================+-----+=======npois=====+ m a b c d f h j z k (hocs*) | hound hocda wbux1 | | ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| research | sescent--+===cbosgd===+--cbosg +===+====+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==houxi=======+====+=======+======+===+ | ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| rabbit--+=alice=+ aluxz--mhuxi--mhuxj osu-dbs | | | n o p r s t v w y u1100a odin--orion--deimos--ariel----vax135 ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| physics | pyuxll mhuxv | nscs | | princeton win--we53 burdvax hoh-2 houxe | houxg oberon | cornell ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| mitccc | pyuxjj--mhuxm | rmas70 | | we04-3b--otuxa--we13-----+=======+=lime=+===+===+----------houti--houca ||||
| | | | | | | | | | ||||
| mit-vax | bwkna--mhuxh | mork-cb | | nwuxc uniq ihlpb ixlpa a b c d e g h i j k l m ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| | hlexa mhuxa | | | inuxa--+==inuxc==+---+=ixn5c==+----+==+==+==+==+==druxs=+==+==+==+==+ ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| psuvax | mhb5c mhuxt | | uiuceml | inuxb inuxd | ixlpc n o p q r t u v w x y z ||||
| | | | | | | | | ||||
| linus--allegra | mh3bs rdb | whuxlb chico | | uicsovax | isrnix | (drux*) ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| +===mhtsa==+---------eagle--wheps--zeppo---------whuxk | uiucdcs--pur-ee--iuvax | iwlc8 iwsl1 iwsl6 ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| wjh12 hpuxa | | whonxa | pur-phy--purdue--ncrday | iwlc7--+==iwls3=+--iwsl4 ||||
| | | | | | | | | ||||
| slinac | | umncs--minn-ua | ihnss ecn-pa | ihtpa | iwsl2 iwsl5 ih1ap ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| sask--hssg40--adec23 | | stolaf | | ixn5h ihnp1 ihnp2 | | ihnp4 | a b c d e f g h i j k l ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| utah-cs--utah-gr | | ihps4--+==+==+======+===+===+===+======+===+==+===+=ihps3+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+==+ ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| | src-unix | uofp | ihps2 | | | ihima | iheds mb2b ixn5k | m n o p q r s t u v w x ||||
| | | | | | | | | | | | ||||
| | uwvax--seismo--rochester | presby | ih4ep | ihps1 ihpad sb6--sb1--ll1--ihldt--ihtnt (ihux*) ||||
| | | | | | | ||||
+====+============+==================+======+======+=================+========harpo=================================================================++++
How to read the map: Connections are denoted by either a "|" or a "-".
"Logical buses" are denoted by "=" or "+". A logical bus is merely
a way of providing more space to indicate connections to a site. For
example, hplabs is represented by the character string "+===hplabs===+".
Places on the map where a dash and vertical bar intersect do not
represent actual intersections, but rather crossovers (think of them
as a highway over/underpass). Unlike the last logical map, there has
been no attempt made to differentiate between various types of networks,
largely because that information is difficult to obtain.
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. :)
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