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The Effort to Save Duke University's Usenet Server
- pdxgene 16y agoRIP Godzilla... where I got my Usenet start... sniff sniff... (*obligatory old fart comments: "Why, in my day, when you wanted an e-mail address, you had to request it by filling out a paper form in person at OIT... and we used Pine... and we LIKED it...")
- ableal 16y agoThe article links the original blog post ( http://www.ngrblog.com/duke-university-usenet/ http://www.ngrblog.com/duke-university-usenet/ ), which includes contact info and further details. It's a pity that, 30 years on, most of the features that made a good NNTP client (from gnus to Xnews) pleasant and fast are still missing. We now have images and videos, user avatars (Usenet 'face' didn't quite take), advertisements too. Good threading, quick selection, fast loading - not so much. Last year, for a while, I read a local auto forum to get the pulse on the car market. The forum was lively and mostly helpful, kept in line by moderators. Just reading, I found most of what I wanted to know. But, looking at the clock, I was unpleasantly surprised by the time it took to plow through a few dozen posts ...
- drinian 16y agoApparently I'm an old fart now, I used Godzilla every day and I only graduated four years ago. And I scored some neat stuff off of triangle.forsale, too -- but even five years ago, the Duke Usenet server was having stability problems that indicated OIT wasn't taking care of it. OIT has been going downhill ever since they contracted out email a few years ago. They have been absolutely the best-run IT department I have encountered, in any public or private sector.