- The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue (cs.columbia.edu)
November 2019 is, as best I can recall, the 40th anniversary of the conception of Usenet. (What’s Usenet? The Wikipedia article is ok but not perfect.) I should have written a proper paper; instead, there will (probably) be an irregular series of blog posts. I’ll do Part I of N tonight.
- Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (Wikipedia)
Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, often shortened as The Motherfuckers or UAW/MF, was a Dadaist and Situationist anarchist affinity group based in New York City. This “street gang with analysis” was famous for its Lower East Side direct action.
- LINUX is obsolete (groups.google.com)
I was in the U.S. for a couple of weeks, so I haven’t commented much on LINUX (not that I would have said much had I been around), but for what it is worth, I have a couple of comments now.
- Usenet (Wikipedia)
Usenet (/ˈjuːznɛt/), USENET, or, “in full”, User’s Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.