Posted on 05/19/2010 5:09:39 PM PDT by Borges
This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.
On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.
Working with a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, they came up with a simple program to exchange messages and files between computers at Duke and UNC using telephone modems.
The “Users Network,” Usenet for short, grew into an international electronic discussion forum with more than 120,000 newsgroups dedicated to various topics, from local dining to computer programming languages. Each group had a distinctive name such as soc.history or sci.math.
Usenet also played an integral role in the growth of the popularity of the Internet, said Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science. At the time, a connection to the Internet was not only expensive but required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“ARPA had funded a few schools to begin the early stages of Internet, but most schools didn’t have that,” said Ramm, who worked with the students who developed Usenet. “Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate in communications.”
Many social aspects of online communication – from emoticons and slang acronyms such as LOL to flame wars – originated or were popularized on Usenet.
Although e-mail and other forms of online communication have largely supplanted Usenet, it is still in use, with tens of thousands of discussion groups.
Indeed, Truscott – now a software developer at SAS Institute in Cary – said he still checks Usenet daily. “In those days, there were very few computers at Duke,” he said. “Now Usenet is just one of many choices.”
New tools – from blogs and RSS feeds to Facebook and Twitter – have made online communication more user-friendly since the days of Usenet, said Lenore Ramm, Dietolf Ramm’s daughter, who now works as an IT analyst with Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT).
“Applications like Twitter have made communicating easier, but the challenges are still the same: trying to keep up with the information flow, sorting through it all and prioritizing what information to take in,” she said.
Like an increasing number of Internet service providers who have shut down their newsgroup servers, Duke decided to retire its aging Usenet server based on low usage and rising costs.
I remember Usenet — anyone else use UUencode and UUdecode to pass music and pics? alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die...?
Thanks for posting...I enjoy Internet history.
I started with Usenet....so sad to see this mode of communication fade away, yet exciting to see all the new developments.
bump
Here’s the guy who REALLY created the Internet (hint: it wasn’t Algore).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Kleinrock
I remember alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die and alt.callahans.
Being from Cleveland, I used Freenet instead.
Usenet was fun. Back in the mid-1990s, I felt like I was on the cutting edge by using it. Also, around that time I was listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, the Chuck Harder radio show and posting on Usenet about the X-Files (TV Show). Those were such innocent days. Now I am more jaded and cynical.
Oh lord... uuencode... [gulp] We forget what a pain in the asterisk it used to be to do even the simplest of things.
And we did it at 300 baud. LOL.
Sad isn’t it? At one time unlimited vistas, now, eh, not so much.
Been there - done that. ;-)
I remember when browsers were only text based (Lynx) and there were only .MIL, .EDU and .GOV domains. And it wasn’t THAT long ago! ;-)
>>And we did it at 300 baud. LOL.<<
Remember TTYs (real ones) at 110 Baud?
Some things are best left in the olden days...
:)
Bullshit in my opinion....yeah, it's all great, but this is "planned obsolescence".
My one year old DVD player is obsolete. My new computer with Win 7 is almost there. I had to get a new Jitterbug last year 'cause it didn't have a GPS. I can hardly find any eight tracks anymore. It all is very frustrating to your run-of-the-mill consumer.
Life sucks.
I met my wife on BITNet (all EDUs).
Long time ago...
I remember, way back in 1989, someone I knew trying desperately to convince me to sign up for email. I didn’t see the point of it. Turns out that he had one of the earliest websites on the WWW. I signed up for the email account reluctantly. I remember thinking to myself, “When the hell am I ever going to use this?”
Even in the mid-1990s someone I knew was amazed when she tried to think me for a gift via email. She saw from my account profile that I had no accessed the account in two years. She said in her email - which I only read nine months later - that she knew that had to be a mistake. No one would just let their email go unchecked for two years!!!
Yeah, I would. I did.
Now I use it TOO MUCH.
>>I can hardly find any eight tracks anymore<<
“hardly?” LOL!
Hey, I have some vinyl licorice pizzas still. I have a USB turntable and am slowly translating them to digital...
I remember trying to keep out the flood uuencoded pr0n from hogging all of my USENET server’s dialup bandwidth. Some things never change.
Ha! The way it is for ALL of us...using too much, that is! My first use of usenet was in sports-talk...it still works well for that.
Traffic volume is up to 6 terabytes per day. Nobody goes to Usenet anymore, it's too crowded.
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