charles hobbs wrote in message ...

On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 1:47:49 AM UTC-7, Rob wrote:

Paul W. Schleck <[email protected]> wrote:

This is from a web-site that is replaying Usenet, and rec.ham-radio,
from 30 years ago (currently summer 1990). The site is:

http://www.olduse.net

If you prefer to use your own newsreader, the site also supports an

NNTP

connection at:

nntp.olduse.net:119

I followed that for a while a couple of years ago, when it covered the
very early days of usenet where you could still read "everything" and
administrators were keeping the hardware of their PDP11 running using
erasers etc. That was very interesting!

What would these people who thought radio is becoming too complicated
because of all the semiconductors have thought when 25 years later
radio transformed from a hardware job into a software (SDR) job?? :-)

Unfortunately, Brian Kantor did not live to be 85 years old and become
as wild as his grandpa... :-(

I was searching for some of my old messages (for another project) and just

had to reply...

30 years? Wow. I was just graduated UCLA (grad school) back then, and had started my first full time job in May.
I had also just received my ham radio license in April.

Los Angeles had started service on its first modern light rail line in June (the last of the "Red Cars" ran in 1961, and the
last of the "Yellow Cars" in 1963). You could hear the train drivers

talking over the air with a police scanner; I put the frequency

(471.3375 MHz) in my sig. (I think it has since changed to something

else...)

Even in those days, when the Internet wasn't generally publicly available,

I was pretty well connected online. I had PeopleLink (Plink) and

Genie (and later, Delphi) accounts, various phone BBSs, a ham radio packet radio BBS account, and Usenet

Back then, Usenet was the go-to place for expert discussions. But Usenet

was hard to access, outside of academia or certain large companies.

After several attempts, I finally got access to Usenet via the UCLA

Computer Club. There were also mailing lists I subscribed to.

Things have certainly changed. Around 1995, the Internet/WWW became more accessible to the general public. Phone BBSs and the
big timesharing services started to take a back seat, and mostly

disappeared around 2000. "Eternal September" and the spammers made

Usenet less desirable for people who wanted to have a decent discussion,

and most of the action moved to dedicated discussion sites.

By the late 2000s, social media networks such as Myspace and Facebook

started to attract users, and Usenet was more or less cast aside,

although a few groups remain busy.

It's been an interesting ride...

I miss the old USENET. Just came back this year for the first time since my
ISP killed their relays in 2003.

It was still huge back then, but ISPs, particularly in the US and UK,
started to kill their NNTP servers because of the proliferation of "warez" groups, and illicit pornography.

Social media came along to fill the gap. It's worth nothing though, that
even though it existed in some forms back then, it wasn't until the ISPs collectively tried to murder USENET that they really took off.

--
OldbieOne
The Guy Who Tells It Like It Is (TM)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)