4 ms·

Usenet Archive (1981 – 1991)

27 points by hggh 4y ago

jas8425 4y ago
Clicking through at random and found this post asking for support for protesters in "Tian-An-Men Square": https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=789653 https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=789653
nequo 4y ago
Here's a thread on the birth of Haskell in 1990.[1] Simon Peyton Jones was writing about GHC supporting parallelization, and the team lacking access to hardware that supports shared memory for testing: Good news: we are; we have a parallel implementation running on the GRIP multiprocessor, with absolute wall-clock speedup over the same programs running on a comparable uniprocessor (never to be taken for granted!). This has only recently sprung to life, so it will be a while before we can report proper results. Bad news: it only runs on GRIP at present, so that rather limits its distribution. We have access to a Meiko transputer machine, but it is quite a lot harder to deal with a distributed memory architecture. The compiler would port rather easily to a shared-memory multiprocessor, but we don't have access to one at present. [1] https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480 https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480
JohnFen 4y ago
Boy, do I miss usenet news. It was a bright, shining star of the internet. Nothing comparable rose to replace it after Google killed it.
- kolinko 4y ago
  Google was a part of it. But spam, and a lack of proper moderation was really the issue. A bigger issue was that Google buried all the archives from the Usenet with it.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Spam was a constant issue, yes, like it is today. But you did at least have reasonable tools to minimize the impact of it. > A bigger issue was that Google buried all the archives from the Usenet with it. Indeed. Killing usenet was bad. Burying the archives was unforgivable.
kjs3 4y ago
Not sure what this is supposed to be, since it's a tiny fraction of the Usenet messages posted during that decade (less than 1%?). But it was nice at a quick glance to see some names I hadn't seen in 30 years.

27 points by hggh 4y ago

Clicking through at random and found this post asking for support for protesters in "Tian-An-Men Square": https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=789653 https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=789653

nequo 4y ago

Here's a thread on the birth of Haskell in 1990.[1] Simon Peyton Jones was writing about GHC supporting parallelization, and the team lacking access to hardware that supports shared memory for testing: Good news: we are; we have a parallel implementation running on the GRIP multiprocessor, with absolute wall-clock speedup over the same programs running on a comparable uniprocessor (never to be taken for granted!). This has only recently sprung to life, so it will be a while before we can report proper results. Bad news: it only runs on GRIP at present, so that rather limits its distribution. We have access to a Meiko transputer machine, but it is quite a lot harder to deal with a distributed memory architecture. The compiler would port rather easily to a shared-memory multiprocessor, but we don't have access to one at present. [1] https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480 https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480

JohnFen 4y ago

Boy, do I miss usenet news. It was a bright, shining star of the internet. Nothing comparable rose to replace it after Google killed it.

kolinko 4y ago
Google was a part of it. But spam, and a lack of proper moderation was really the issue. A bigger issue was that Google buried all the archives from the Usenet with it.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Spam was a constant issue, yes, like it is today. But you did at least have reasonable tools to minimize the impact of it. > A bigger issue was that Google buried all the archives from the Usenet with it. Indeed. Killing usenet was bad. Burying the archives was unforgivable.

kjs3 4y ago

Not sure what this is supposed to be, since it's a tiny fraction of the Usenet messages posted during that decade (less than 1%?). But it was nice at a quick glance to see some names I hadn't seen in 30 years.