That's what parity data was for. There were even clients that would seek out all of the binaries that had enough parts for a full download and do all of the wo

That's what parity data was for. There were even clients that would seek out all of the binaries that had enough parts for a full download and do all of the work for you. That said, alt.binaries was a big reason that ISPs started dropping Usenet. The other being the ever decreasing signal to noise ratio as the entire system proved to be vulnerable to spam and trolls. Yet another example of why moderation is a necessary evil if you want to scale up a discussion group.