8 ms·

Unix in East Germany (1990)

159 points by mdip 8y ago

the-dude 8y ago
Google thinks I need to login to read this. edit: which is funny, Google won't let me in, East Germany wouldn't let you out.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  Better alternative link: http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP Yes, I have an Usenet archive in my harddrive so I can search for the message, get its original Message-ID, and present you a link to Joey Hess's historical Usenet exhibition. Google Groups was originally Deja News, the most complete Usenet history archive at the time. But Google acquired it ~2000, and converted it into to Google's private forum service, instead of a museum that preserves the history. Not only the original raw archive was not available to the public anymore, but they also REMOVED the original message querying and indexing. In Google Groups, you can read historical posts, but cannot find any technical trace of the original history - the whole thing is not indexed in the original way, I didn't even find a option to show the message header, making it utterly useless for archeology, instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities, and far from complete. This is really bad. And apparently Google Groups as Google's private forum, is also already irrelevant. A lose-lose.
  - wazoox 8y ago
    Did you build your archive from Usenet, or through spidering DejaNews/Google groups?
    - bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
      > instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities, The archive is online, I just downloaded a copy. The first major Usenet archive was dumped from the old tape of the University of Toronto's Department of Zoology, it covered the posts their server received from late 80s to 1991. You can download it from here. https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive. It's ~2 GiB in compressed gzip, ~20 GiB in raw. Another is The Internet Archive's "Usenet Historical Collection", contains post made in the 90s, donated by an anonymous user, around ~200 GiB. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection The UTZoo's archive is very handy to have. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). The downside is no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. Feels like trapping inside the fake 3D Hologram of the Usenet golden age, created by a supercomputer in the abandoned space station, as in the plot of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories. Unfortunately, the original archive from DejaNews/Google Groups, the most authoritative and complete source is inaccessible by the public. Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has-made-its-internet-archive-impossible-to-search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has...
      - wahern 8y ago
        I can't understand why Google just doesn't release its archives. To what end are they keeping it private? How is it a significant competitive advantage for anything they do? Google keeping the archive locked up was what (many years ago) made it clear to me that it stopped being the company of "don't be evil". In fact, locking up the archive is about as gratuitously evil as you can get short of actual violence and theft.
        scruffyherder 8y ago
        Because they are building a profile of you to sell your information to advertisers and anyone else interested. If they just GAVE data away, how could they market what you are looking for?
    - scruffyherder 8y ago
      I used the old AltaVista desktop search engine, fed it the usenet data, and setup some proxies and mod_rewrite / Substitution strings and got it online that way. https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/02/25/personal-altavista-utzoo-reloaded/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/02/25/personal-altav... But it's a super great resource to have, a decade of usenet traffic, it's about 10GB uncompressed.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    Does The Internet Archive not have one? I thought they'd always have the best archive of anything worth archiving from the internet. EDIT: Nevermind. I see now that you've posted a link to an archive from the Internet Archive in another comment.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Apparently it does this if it knows you have an account. If you open in incognito it will let you see it fine and dandy. I hate Google Groups and their abuse of requiring JS for what is nothing more than just text and this login crap.
- scruffyherder 8y ago
  https://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b168/comp/unix/wizards/22455.txt https://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b168/comp/unix/... It's part of the UT Zoo Usenet archive.
krylon 8y ago
This is so fascinating. By the time I understood why and how Germany was two separate states, the wall was long gone. It is weird,actually,because I am glad I did not have to live through those times, but I do get a wave of something nostalgia-like, as I read this.
- k__ 8y ago
  Same here. My father and his family came from the east (they got thrown out one day) and my mother from the west. I was only 4 years old when the wall fell and didn't have any interest in the topic until I was 13 or something.
  - teilo 8y ago
    Man, you guys make me feel old.
    - lizknope 8y ago
      I was 14 in 1989 when my Dad and I were watching TV and they switched over to show East and West Germans breaking through the wall and hugging each other. I remember watching for hours because I knew I was watching history being made.
      - krylon 8y ago
        Me too. I did not understand fully what was going on, but I remember the excitement and optimism that hung in the air.
  - da02 8y ago
    Why were they thrown out?
    - k__ 8y ago
      I don't know really. They wanted to leave and then got harrassed. My uncle got into prison with 18 because of their wish to leave. The government did try many things to silence them. Then, one night, government said they should pack what they can carry and leave.
maze-le 8y ago
>> We should have been working on the development of a 386 for the past year, but so far it has not been possible for us to turn up even one such machine. I guess that has been true for everything.
- stormking 8y ago
  No. Basic needs like food, clothing etc. were fully covered. Any kind of electronics (e.g. a color TV) were hard to acquire. You had to wait 10 years to be able to buy a new car. And housing was a big problem. Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment.
  - severino 8y ago
    Well, here in the west you also had the right to get your own apartment at that age. You only didn't have the bucks ;-)
  - jlg23 8y ago
    > Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment. This is one way to look at it. The other way: free, guaranteed child care (probably mandatory for most as well) for every kid just a few months old. You could easily have a kid and study or work - that was the norm, not the exception. Disclaimer: I'm the kid of a woman who got her PhD in medicine in east Germany. "Feminism" was a concept I only learned about when the wall fell. In the east, as far as I can see, it was a woman's duty to be productive for society, not about a "right to work while raising kids".
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were far ahead of the West. Not sure how that came about.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
_glass 8y ago
Funny my father did computer science and economics at that time at that university. He told me about the US computers that had special keys to make them look different, like an exchanged dollar sign. Now that appears to me just as line noise.
Sniffnoy 8y ago
Non-mobile link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX_dxElrVNs https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX...
- jwilk 8y ago
  Plain HTML version: https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2Fcomp.unix.wizards%2FQX_dxElrVNs https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2F...
pavlov 8y ago
Trivia: the university mentioned in this story was in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a city which had this name in 1953-1990 but is today known as Chemnitz.
- Annatar 8y ago
  Trivia is always the best, most salient part of every story, which ironically makes it not trivial at all.
senozhatsky 8y ago
That's a really interesting read. Accodring to some reports the Russians had access to 2.9 or 4.2 BSD source code in 1980-1982(?) http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS not sure if they had have to do "translation by hand into another language". A bit unrelated: Wow, I can barely tell what I've been up to 2 years ago; how do people remember things that happened some 30-40 years ago... -ss
- juiyout 8y ago
  I believe there was a study on how people with different age perceive passing of time differently. I guess, for those people, 30-40 years ago might seem like yesterday. Another wager is that you might be younger than those people.

159 points by mdip 8y ago

Google thinks I need to login to read this. edit: which is funny, Google won't let me in, East Germany wouldn't let you out.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Better alternative link: http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP http://article.olduse.net/4737%40ethz.UUCP Yes, I have an Usenet archive in my harddrive so I can search for the message, get its original Message-ID, and present you a link to Joey Hess's historical Usenet exhibition. Google Groups was originally Deja News, the most complete Usenet history archive at the time. But Google acquired it ~2000, and converted it into to Google's private forum service, instead of a museum that preserves the history. Not only the original raw archive was not available to the public anymore, but they also REMOVED the original message querying and indexing. In Google Groups, you can read historical posts, but cannot find any technical trace of the original history - the whole thing is not indexed in the original way, I didn't even find a option to show the message header, making it utterly useless for archeology, instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities, and far from complete. This is really bad. And apparently Google Groups as Google's private forum, is also already irrelevant. A lose-lose.
- wazoox 8y ago
  Did you build your archive from Usenet, or through spidering DejaNews/Google groups?
  - bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
    > instead, now the best Usenet archive we have is saved from some old tapes from one or two universities, The archive is online, I just downloaded a copy. The first major Usenet archive was dumped from the old tape of the University of Toronto's Department of Zoology, it covered the posts their server received from late 80s to 1991. You can download it from here. https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive. It's ~2 GiB in compressed gzip, ~20 GiB in raw. Another is The Internet Archive's "Usenet Historical Collection", contains post made in the 90s, donated by an anonymous user, around ~200 GiB. https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection https://archive.org/details/usenethistorical&tab=collection The UTZoo's archive is very handy to have. There are a million posts to read and no spam and low-effort posting at all (by modern standards, even many flame wars seem to be high-quality). The downside is no external resources is accessible, and nobody is going to reply you. Feels like trapping inside the fake 3D Hologram of the Usenet golden age, created by a supercomputer in the abandoned space station, as in the plot of Otomo Katsuhiro's Memories. Unfortunately, the original archive from DejaNews/Google Groups, the most authoritative and complete source is inaccessible by the public. Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has-made-its-internet-archive-impossible-to-search http://motherboard.vice.com/read/google-a-search-company-has...
    - wahern 8y ago
      I can't understand why Google just doesn't release its archives. To what end are they keeping it private? How is it a significant competitive advantage for anything they do? Google keeping the archive locked up was what (many years ago) made it clear to me that it stopped being the company of "don't be evil". In fact, locking up the archive is about as gratuitously evil as you can get short of actual violence and theft.
      - scruffyherder 8y ago
        Because they are building a profile of you to sell your information to advertisers and anyone else interested. If they just GAVE data away, how could they market what you are looking for?
  - scruffyherder 8y ago
    I used the old AltaVista desktop search engine, fed it the usenet data, and setup some proxies and mod_rewrite / Substitution strings and got it online that way. https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/02/25/personal-altavista-utzoo-reloaded/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/02/25/personal-altav... But it's a super great resource to have, a decade of usenet traffic, it's about 10GB uncompressed.
- jolmg 8y ago
  Does The Internet Archive not have one? I thought they'd always have the best archive of anything worth archiving from the internet. EDIT: Nevermind. I see now that you've posted a link to an archive from the Internet Archive in another comment.
jimktrains2 8y ago
Apparently it does this if it knows you have an account. If you open in incognito it will let you see it fine and dandy. I hate Google Groups and their abuse of requiring JS for what is nothing more than just text and this login crap.
scruffyherder 8y ago
https://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b168/comp/unix/wizards/22455.txt https://utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b168/comp/unix/... It's part of the UT Zoo Usenet archive.

krylon 8y ago

This is so fascinating. By the time I understood why and how Germany was two separate states, the wall was long gone. It is weird,actually,because I am glad I did not have to live through those times, but I do get a wave of something nostalgia-like, as I read this.

k__ 8y ago
Same here. My father and his family came from the east (they got thrown out one day) and my mother from the west. I was only 4 years old when the wall fell and didn't have any interest in the topic until I was 13 or something.
- teilo 8y ago
  Man, you guys make me feel old.
  - lizknope 8y ago
    I was 14 in 1989 when my Dad and I were watching TV and they switched over to show East and West Germans breaking through the wall and hugging each other. I remember watching for hours because I knew I was watching history being made.
    - krylon 8y ago
      Me too. I did not understand fully what was going on, but I remember the excitement and optimism that hung in the air.
- da02 8y ago
  Why were they thrown out?
  - k__ 8y ago
    I don't know really. They wanted to leave and then got harrassed. My uncle got into prison with 18 because of their wish to leave. The government did try many things to silence them. Then, one night, government said they should pack what they can carry and leave.

maze-le 8y ago

>> We should have been working on the development of a 386 for the past year, but so far it has not been possible for us to turn up even one such machine. I guess that has been true for everything.

stormking 8y ago
No. Basic needs like food, clothing etc. were fully covered. Any kind of electronics (e.g. a color TV) were hard to acquire. You had to wait 10 years to be able to buy a new car. And housing was a big problem. Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment.
- severino 8y ago
  Well, here in the west you also had the right to get your own apartment at that age. You only didn't have the bucks ;-)
- jlg23 8y ago
  > Women in the GDR typically became pregnant at a very young age (18-21) because a family with a child had the right to get its own apartment. This is one way to look at it. The other way: free, guaranteed child care (probably mandatory for most as well) for every kid just a few months old. You could easily have a kid and study or work - that was the norm, not the exception. Disclaimer: I'm the kid of a woman who got her PhD in medicine in east Germany. "Feminism" was a concept I only learned about when the wall fell. In the east, as far as I can see, it was a woman's duty to be productive for society, not about a "right to work while raising kids".
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    In terms of women's participation in the workforce the communist states were far ahead of the West. Not sure how that came about.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago

_glass 8y ago

Funny my father did computer science and economics at that time at that university. He told me about the US computers that had special keys to make them look different, like an exchanged dollar sign. Now that appears to me just as line noise.

Sniffnoy 8y ago

Non-mobile link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX_dxElrVNs https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.unix.wizards/QX...

jwilk 8y ago
Plain HTML version: https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2Fcomp.unix.wizards%2FQX_dxElrVNs https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic%2F...

pavlov 8y ago

Trivia: the university mentioned in this story was in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a city which had this name in 1953-1990 but is today known as Chemnitz.

Annatar 8y ago
Trivia is always the best, most salient part of every story, which ironically makes it not trivial at all.

senozhatsky 8y ago

That's a really interesting read. Accodring to some reports the Russians had access to 2.9 or 4.2 BSD source code in 1980-1982(?) http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEMOS not sure if they had have to do "translation by hand into another language". A bit unrelated: Wow, I can barely tell what I've been up to 2 years ago; how do people remember things that happened some 30-40 years ago... -ss

juiyout 8y ago
I believe there was a study on how people with different age perceive passing of time differently. I guess, for those people, 30-40 years ago might seem like yesterday. Another wager is that you might be younger than those people.