5 ms·

The newsgroups, a.k.a. net news, were the front page of the internet -- more so than Reddit ever was -- till the web started taking off in the very early 1990s.

The newsgroups, a.k.a. net news, were the front page of the internet -- more so than Reddit ever was -- till the web started taking off in the very early 1990s. The only other service that might lay claim to that title would be IRC (Internet Relay Chat), but net news probably had about twice as many users. The big difference between those two services and the web was that most participants used text-only software (in terminals) to access them. Actually an even bigger difference is that (like all the other services on the internet back then) net news and IRC were run by volunteers. The average IQ on the internet back then was more than 130 (whereas of course today it is in the range of 102 to 105) -- and it was 98% or 99% men and much more libertarian than today. One thing that hasn't changed is that people back then tended to spent much more time on the internet (particularly, on the newsgroups, IRC, text-only MMORPGs) than is good for them. It was always called the newsgroups or "net news": calling it Usenet was started by the news industry when they started explaining the internet to the world in 1993 and 1994 because obviously "net news" is a horrible name (in their minds) for any service or scene that they did not control. More precisely, the newsgroups began on what is basically a "competitor" to the internet called Usenet, then migrated to the internet, so "Usenet news", i.e., that news-like service that started on Usenet, is not a terrible name for it, but "Usenet" by itself is kind of a bad name because it already meant something different, namely, this network (now probably long gone) that carried email and other services in addition to newsgroups.

jibal 1y ago
"calling it Usenet was started by the news industry" This, along with several of your other claims, is a fabrication. I actually participated in the vote on the name at the 1982 USENIX conference.
- dang 1y ago
  Wow!
  - jibal 1y ago
    As long as you're here ... can I have whatever sort of limit you have on me lifted, please?
    - dang 1y ago
      I already did that. But can you please do a better job of sticking to the HN guidelines? I'm in awe of your involvement in computing history, but you've also posted quite a few comments that break the rules here, which is not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - jibal 1y ago
        Thank you. I will study those rules and work to be a better HN citizen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, and for calling me out appropriately.
      - jibal 1y ago
        About my involvement: I was in the right place at the right time. I was hanging out in the UCLA Computer Club in 1968 at lunchtime when Steve Crocker (new head of the UCLA ARPANET project under Leonard Kleinrock) came by--he wanted to teach a class on "LISP and Theorem Proving" and wanted to know how to register it. We chatted and he told me about his recent MIT PhD Thesis on man/machine symbiosis to help programmers figure out other programmers' code (e.g., dead COBOL programmers), and I made a brash comment about being good at figuring out code, so he gave me a couple of challenges on the whiteboard that I just happened to be expert in, and he offered me a job with the Comp Sci Dept on the spot. I ended up sharing a cubicle wall with Jon Postel. My supervisor was Charley Kline, who was the first person to ever to a remote network login, to SRI--it famously crashed on the first attempt but they quickly found the bug and he logged in at 10:27pm. This was just a few weeks after the IMP arrived, which sat in a corner for a couple of weeks while engineering student Mike Wingfield built an interface card to connect the IMP to the Sigma-7 host. I was in the machine room when Mike came in with the board held high shouting "Eureka!"
      - jibal 1y ago
        Another bit of "just so happened" involvement in computing history: I was on X3J11, the C language standards committee (one of the very few members there on my own dime after someone on ByteCom challenged me to put up or shut up after complaining about some of the committee's decisions) and, due to alphabetical order, I was the first person to vote to standardize the language. IIRC, it passed unanimously except for an abstention from Doug Gwyn (famous for saying “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things”).
- hollerith 1y ago
  I stand corrected. My mistake was assuming that the friend who introduced me to it in 1991 was representative: he called it net news and in 1993 or 1994 when people started calling it Usenet, he told me that no one in his experience called it that. The first people I observed to call it Usenet were mainstream news articles. When web sites owned by mainstream media started appearing, the phrase "net news" appeared on more than one of their mastheads / headers.
jibal 1y ago
Newsgroups/Netnews were not the front page (whatever that means) of the internet since the internet did not yet exist (and the internet is a collection of interconnected networks ... it's a category mistake to talk about a "front page" for such a thing). There was the government-run ARPANET first developed in 1969 (I was among the developers), and there was a UUCP-based network over phone lines between UNIX hosts started in 1980 (shortly after UUCP was released) over which Netnews ran. Netnews was known as "the poor man's ARPANET" as any UNIX machine could receive it whereas being on the ARPANET was heavily restricted. These are totally different technologies, and different yet was the future internet which was based on the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (but based on packet switching like the ARPANET). In no way was usenet a "competitor" of the ARPANET (and certainly not the internet), or even of the World Wide Web ... these are very different sorts of things. It was more like a big brother to the many Bulletin Board Systems that proliferated that ran over FidoNet and BITNET. The news industry had nothing to do with the name "usenet", which came into use in 1982 as a result of a vote by the participants (I was one) at a USENIX conference. The "use" part came from USENIX (the UNIX user's organization). It was decided that "usenet" would refer just to the newsgroups, and the network itself was called UUCPNET. There is of course no measure of the IQ of users of usenet (or of the ARPANET, or of the internet, or of the web, which again are different things). One can suspect that it was above average because the nodes were mostly universities, but not everyone going to universities is above average in intelligence. There is also of course no measure of their political leanings, but since these were universities shortly after the invasion of VietNam and its accompanying draft and fresh from the development of the civil rights, LGBT, women's rights, and environmental movements, they tended to be quite liberal, but of course there was a spectrum and some extreme outliers (Clayton Cramer comes to mind). The most memorable libertarian I recall was Laura Creighton who, notably, was not a man. I particularly remember her saying, without any irony, that "If I thought I didn't have free will I'd shoot myself". Ah, those were the days.
- hollerith 1y ago
  Just because I wasn't a first-person witness to the start of ARPANET in 1969 or the early years of the newsgroups doesn't mean that I can't be an accurate witness to the newsgroups or the internet when I encountered them in 1991, which was at least 6 months before the web starting having any significant influence on the internet. In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET. I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future. I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers? E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?

jibal 1y ago

"calling it Usenet was started by the news industry" This, along with several of your other claims, is a fabrication. I actually participated in the vote on the name at the 1982 USENIX conference.

dang 1y ago
Wow!
- jibal 1y ago
  As long as you're here ... can I have whatever sort of limit you have on me lifted, please?
  - dang 1y ago
    I already did that. But can you please do a better job of sticking to the HN guidelines? I'm in awe of your involvement in computing history, but you've also posted quite a few comments that break the rules here, which is not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - jibal 1y ago
      Thank you. I will study those rules and work to be a better HN citizen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, and for calling me out appropriately.
    - jibal 1y ago
      About my involvement: I was in the right place at the right time. I was hanging out in the UCLA Computer Club in 1968 at lunchtime when Steve Crocker (new head of the UCLA ARPANET project under Leonard Kleinrock) came by--he wanted to teach a class on "LISP and Theorem Proving" and wanted to know how to register it. We chatted and he told me about his recent MIT PhD Thesis on man/machine symbiosis to help programmers figure out other programmers' code (e.g., dead COBOL programmers), and I made a brash comment about being good at figuring out code, so he gave me a couple of challenges on the whiteboard that I just happened to be expert in, and he offered me a job with the Comp Sci Dept on the spot. I ended up sharing a cubicle wall with Jon Postel. My supervisor was Charley Kline, who was the first person to ever to a remote network login, to SRI--it famously crashed on the first attempt but they quickly found the bug and he logged in at 10:27pm. This was just a few weeks after the IMP arrived, which sat in a corner for a couple of weeks while engineering student Mike Wingfield built an interface card to connect the IMP to the Sigma-7 host. I was in the machine room when Mike came in with the board held high shouting "Eureka!"
    - jibal 1y ago
      Another bit of "just so happened" involvement in computing history: I was on X3J11, the C language standards committee (one of the very few members there on my own dime after someone on ByteCom challenged me to put up or shut up after complaining about some of the committee's decisions) and, due to alphabetical order, I was the first person to vote to standardize the language. IIRC, it passed unanimously except for an abstention from Doug Gwyn (famous for saying “Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things”).
hollerith 1y ago
I stand corrected. My mistake was assuming that the friend who introduced me to it in 1991 was representative: he called it net news and in 1993 or 1994 when people started calling it Usenet, he told me that no one in his experience called it that. The first people I observed to call it Usenet were mainstream news articles. When web sites owned by mainstream media started appearing, the phrase "net news" appeared on more than one of their mastheads / headers.

jibal 1y ago

Newsgroups/Netnews were not the front page (whatever that means) of the internet since the internet did not yet exist (and the internet is a collection of interconnected networks ... it's a category mistake to talk about a "front page" for such a thing). There was the government-run ARPANET first developed in 1969 (I was among the developers), and there was a UUCP-based network over phone lines between UNIX hosts started in 1980 (shortly after UUCP was released) over which Netnews ran. Netnews was known as "the poor man's ARPANET" as any UNIX machine could receive it whereas being on the ARPANET was heavily restricted. These are totally different technologies, and different yet was the future internet which was based on the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (but based on packet switching like the ARPANET). In no way was usenet a "competitor" of the ARPANET (and certainly not the internet), or even of the World Wide Web ... these are very different sorts of things. It was more like a big brother to the many Bulletin Board Systems that proliferated that ran over FidoNet and BITNET. The news industry had nothing to do with the name "usenet", which came into use in 1982 as a result of a vote by the participants (I was one) at a USENIX conference. The "use" part came from USENIX (the UNIX user's organization). It was decided that "usenet" would refer just to the newsgroups, and the network itself was called UUCPNET. There is of course no measure of the IQ of users of usenet (or of the ARPANET, or of the internet, or of the web, which again are different things). One can suspect that it was above average because the nodes were mostly universities, but not everyone going to universities is above average in intelligence. There is also of course no measure of their political leanings, but since these were universities shortly after the invasion of VietNam and its accompanying draft and fresh from the development of the civil rights, LGBT, women's rights, and environmental movements, they tended to be quite liberal, but of course there was a spectrum and some extreme outliers (Clayton Cramer comes to mind). The most memorable libertarian I recall was Laura Creighton who, notably, was not a man. I particularly remember her saying, without any irony, that "If I thought I didn't have free will I'd shoot myself". Ah, those were the days.

hollerith 1y ago
Just because I wasn't a first-person witness to the start of ARPANET in 1969 or the early years of the newsgroups doesn't mean that I can't be an accurate witness to the newsgroups or the internet when I encountered them in 1991, which was at least 6 months before the web starting having any significant influence on the internet. In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET. I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future. I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers? E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?