02 Aug 08 Usenet? What’s That?

I used usenet before I had an internet account.

My first PC – 640 RAM, DOS 3.3, 12 VGA (256 color 640 x 480), 30MB hard drive, which cost me £1,250 ($2,500) – was fine with email, and news. That was back in 1986. IRC worked on it too when it came along.

It came with a set of disks labelled Windows 1.0. I put them in and played with them, but it didn’t do anything I couldn’t do in DOS, and it was a heck of a lot slower at it. I put them in a draw and didn’t bother with them again.

I didn’t want some fancy GUI messing up my nice tidy organized hard drive, where I had every application in a separate folder, exactly where I chose to put it.

Anyway, I digress. I had a lot of fun in Usenet. Nothing untoward, there were no binaries then, and when they first appeared it seemed such a hassle to download (I had to suffer dial-up all the way down to early 2000).

Someone did send me a naughty picture once – and it took 40, yes forty, minutes, to get this GIF file over a 1200bps modem.I wasn’t impressed. There weren’t any mp3s about then, most all of the software I used was shareware, and anyway, my telephone bills were so high – as I had to pay for every single minute I was online, that I didn’t have any spare cash to buy anything else anyway.

I finally relented in 1994 and upgraded to a second-hand 386SX machine with 8MB RAM, and an 85MB HD. I thought I was in a Ferrari at the time. It cost me £400 ($800). I did this so I could run Windows. Why did I want to run Windows? So I could see what all this Graphical stuff was all about called The World Wide Web.

It wasn’t up to much. There wasn’t much on it. Some educational stuff, and a few corporations with a single page. Nothing to buy then of course. No Music on there, no sites for naughty boys (or girls) to ogle at.

So for the most part, I was back in DOS, back in IRC, and back in Usenet. The thing is too, back in those days when I had to pay for EVERY minute online, I could log into the NNTP server, download the news, then grab my email too, and go offline again, read all the mail and news, and then dial-in and send it. You very much felt part of a community, even though it was in real time. It was still exciting that you got connected with people all over the world, and might even get a reply back from them the very same evening! Magic!

I switched to the local cable company, and they offered dial-up phone service too, with FREE local calls. That was unheard of in the UK, even though it was pretty much standard practice in the US. Now, I could stay online all the time if I wanted. Except for one thing. Other people in the house wanted to use the darn phone line to… make phone calls.

I got a second line put in, that cost more in line rental than my Internet account did.

Then my internet provider gave us web space. 5MB. Wow! What can we do with that?

I was on my way on the web, and my usenet use started to give way to web use instead. That would have been around 1996.

As I mentioned before, I got broadband in early 2000, and I’ve never really looked back from there.

Usenet? I still use it. I have one or two uk.local groups I still post in from time to time. I’ve never met any of the people in the newgroups that I post in, even though I’ve seen some of their names for more than 15 years now.

I don’t really care what they look like. It’s the conversation that counts. The banter that goes back and forth.  I don’t need to know where they live, or their birthday, or their job, or anything else. If they say something that catches my attention, I respond, and vice versa. That’s it. That was the fun with Usenet. Log in, download the news, read, reply.  It was the social media network of the 80′s and 90′s.

Would I want to turn the clock back? No. Not really.

Life online was simpler then, and it was more pleasant without the idiotic spammers. But, I’m enjoying all the stuff I can do now online. I like that I can download music and  movies. I’ve always disliked crowds, and waiting in line for more than a few minutes, so shopping is something to be endured in my book, and not enjoyed. I enjoy shopping online though. I can take as long as I want to research stuff, and pick the best price from a whole load of outlets most of the time. It makes me a living too.

I don’t think Usenet is dead yet, but perhps it’s seen its best days. I think that IRC is on the same road too. Many folks these days haven’t even heard of Usenet, and IRC, so perhaps they’ll end up going back to the kind of role they played when they first started out – for the geeks.

Now that could be something to look forward to!

Tags: binaries, corporations, dos 3, email, fancy gui, ferrari, forty minutes, gif file, hard drive, hassle, hd, heck, internet account, irc, modem, mp3s, naughty boys, nntp server, vga, world wide web