Before the web, before Gopher, WAIS, Archie, and the lot, people went on the Internet to review, contribute, and rant about newsgroups.
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\nOfficially known as Usenet, the newsgroups were message boards early Internet users could subscribe to. They covered a variety of topics, from scientific research to poems to jokes to movie reviews and fan fiction. I remember back in the 1980s and early 1990s turning on my computer and reviewing my newsgroups as a way to start my computing day.<\/p>\n
You may not have been around back then, or just lacked an Internet connection, but most early Internet software packages came with a newsgroup reader program. Unless you were a grizzled veteran of a Unix host somewhere (I was fortunate), you probably didn’t mess with newsgroups because it was a lot of text and confusion.<\/p>\n
Newsgroups featured a hierarchical naming structure. So you’d visit I was a major fan of I had one of those 10-foot “Montana State Flower” TV satellite dishes back in the 1990s. I would watch the raw upload of Babylon 5<\/em> every week, seeing the episode before anyone else. Well, seeing it before people with regular cable TV service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Usenet newsgroups came in two flavors. The majority were text feeds. Yep, just wall after wall of text. Some of them would be pretty hot too: The Star Trek<\/em> forums were rife with college sophomores desperately using what little they knew of physics to try to explain Warp Factor 2.<\/p>\n Trolls were around back then, often starting a “flame war” between opposing camps. They would begin their messages with the tag The second newsgroup flavor was binary. The NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) didn’t handle raw binary data, only text. So binary files were translated into text by using a coder\/decoder. If you were fortunate, the decoder was part of your newsgroup reader software. Otherwise, you had to save the message text and then use a separate program to decode and create the binary file. And sometimes the files came in several parts, which had to be stitched together.<\/p>\n What was the most popular type of binary newsgroup file? Why, porn of course. That’s right. Before the web, porn was found on Usenet newsgroups.<\/p>\n I read somewhere that the last NNTP (newsgroup protocol) server went offline about 10 years ago. That makes sense. The Web, Facebook, blogs, and other outlets have provided a lot of the services offered via Usenet and the newsgroups. But back in the day, the newsgroups were a big deal if you were on the Internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gone now, but once the most popular thing to do on the Internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6923"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6958,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6923\/revisions\/6958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}comp.lang.c<\/code>, or Computer Languages C, to read about C programming. Like any message system, you’d peruse topics and then view messages on those topics. You could post a reply or start a new thread.<\/p>\nrec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated<\/code>, Babylon 5<\/em> being my favorite TV show at the time. The creator, J. Michael Straczynski, was — yes, he himself — on that forum and would answer questions and provide insights. It was amazing connectivity.<\/p>\n\/FLAME ON<\/code> and then end with \/FLAME ON<\/code>. It’s a practice you often see echoed on today’s blogs.<\/p>\n