Remembering The 1984 Unix PC. Why Did It Fail So Hard?
“I love these machines,” writes long-time Slashdot reader Shayde:

I was super-active in the Unix-PC Usenet groups back in the 90s… We hacked the hell out of them. They were small, sexy, and… they ran Unix!

Unfortunately, they were a commercial failure. There were so many things wrong with them — not just stuff that broke, but the baseline configuration was nigh … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Off-topic areas are always a good idea. :-) Web forums often had those. And web forums are actually what I had in mind, @bender@twtxt.net. 😅 (While I do have a certain nostalgia for it now, Usenet has always been a bit weird to me. Can’t really explain why.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de “topic-based forums/groups”, you mean what USENET used to be, and the “niche” that Reddit is fulfilling these days? :-D I get it, I agree. I think I find twtxt more fulfilling than anything else because of its small size. I feel like I truly know everyone (even if that might not be true), and find myself “at home”. The bigger the place, the shyest I become, the less enticing it is.

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

First we got 9fans to be moderated, now we’ve brought back comp.os.plan9! Come say hi! #plan9 #usenet

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network.

Usenet had to die ⌘ Read more

The USENET Cookbook: One of the earliest digital publications
Long before HTML or PDF… we had Emacs, plain text, and USENET. And it was glorious. ⌘ Read more

I’ve been running some internal usenet groups for a while, now I’m starting to make more use of them and slap them on the web - https://omg.singles/T7ggI

as the person who motivated CompuServe’s USENET gateway https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-10-07-9410070309-story.html I’ve see what happens when the unwashed masses are turned loose in techie playgrounds

So, I’m working on a fediverse client based on https://web.archive.org/web/20190101185657/https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/usenet/ ; it’s here: https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/fern . It is currently read-only, but it has read history.

Usenet History: How Binaries Took Over Newsgroups https://tedium.co/2017/10/03/usenet-binaries-history/

lainspotting: Robert Anton Wilson on Usenet (1995-2003) http://www.lainspotting.com/2017/07/robert-anton-wilson-on-usenet-1995-2003.html

Screw SPEWS
Recently I found out that my existing server IP—the server I am moving away from—is banned on SPEWS (I am not linking them, Google it and you shall know), because it is assigned to UUnet, which is blamed of harbouring spammers. Following the recommendation of the bounced email I posted on Usenet, asking to be removed, without knowing at that time that it was something out of my h … ⌘ Read more