Does Anyone Peruse Usenet or the Newgroups?

[John Rogers]

Not the "Dark Web" that is talked about but what was in the internet when it originally started and you transferred things by FTP and so on? I have been using usenet since we did dial up back in 1978 so our girls could look up info for homework assignments. Then came AOL and shortly after the net became graphic with browsers and such. It is still a super interesting place to peruse and there is EVERTHING in there! I noticed several used ID's seem to be associated with 80% of the uploads so I was wondering how in the hell they have time to upload several million items every day after getting into a website and grabbing all their content? Any ideas?

[id10t]

All scriptable.

Never got into the alt.binaries groups, but lots of BBS use and then nntp (newsgroups) for local fishing, buy/sell, etc. Several listservs as well, including 356talk before the Registry got modern and built a forum.

Forums (like this one!) have replaced all of that.

Had a telnet account on a UF server when I was in high school (programming class) and remember setting up my ~/.plan file and fingering people. "Social Media" has replaced that...

[VincentVega]

ha, alt.binaries.... back when 128 baud was a HUGE upgrade

uploads where automated then, if there are folks still there I assume this hasnt changed

[GH85Carrera]

I used to play on the use-nets back in my dial up days and DOS. I used to have my own BBS and did a lot of FIDO net back in the olden days. I remember so vividly the first time I download one entire megabyte in just 12 minutes. Wow, that was fast. Now I see software are 200 MB on a regular basis and they take seconds.

[masraum]

not in 15-20 years.

[Heel n Toe]

I read and participated in some interesting threads in "Driving" or whatever it was called. Huge arguments on stuff like tailgating, using the zipper method to merge down to one lane, daytime running lights, etc.

How does one get to that place now? I'd like to take a look.

[Vipergrün]

alt.surfing, alt.binaries.pictures, rec.boats Achie, Veronica, Gopher....the good ol days, having to download multiple parts of a boobie pic, strip out the garbage, and put into a single file just to see it.

[John Rogers]

Most ISP like COX have a way to get into such as news.west.cox.net. Make sure that port 119 is not blocked which at most schools and workplaces is the case. Or you can down load an access program such as GigaNews and they have a free trial for a week or two if I remember correctly? I use a reader application named Usenet Explorer or you can use the one from GigaNews. Once that is done try looking into alt.binaries.music.mp3 to see what is there. Last time I looked there about 2 1/2 million entries with a lot of European groups and people you have never heard of? A reader program will look at the "header", like the subject line in an email and the mp3 file will be an attachment which can be downloaded and saved. The question of illegal copying generally comes up but Usenet was NOT put in the anti copy write law that 'ol Al Gore wrote up? Not that I would ever do anything illegal!!!!

[epbrown]

Back in my Usenet days (running Forte Agent) I was most active on alt.fan.cecil-adams and comp.sys.laptops - I still swing by both groups occasionally, but activity is waay down from what it used to be and all of the regulars have moved on.