@Garrathian @xumsixle There's some screenshots at http://tin.org/gfx/index.html. Strictly speaking that's too modern, though: tin is 90s software, not 80s 😀

USENET messages are basically email messages with a few extra header lines. They're REALLY easy to deal with, assuming you have the stock transport layer (uucp - "Unix to Unix CP" - networked file copy over serial lines).

My first experience with usenet was... 1989? Via an interactive dial-in system. (Imagine something halfway between a BBS and an internet provider.) But I was running a (very tiny) unix-like system at home, so I wanted my own feed. I had uucp, but none of the readers would compile on my system. (It was Coherent on a 286 PC - which gets around the problem of the 286 not having a proper MMU by limiting processes to 64K code + 64K data, like a PDP-11.)

Anyways, I downloaded a usenet reader, read the source code, and wrote my own. (That was a much smaller project than it sounds: like I said, usenet message format is TRIVIAL.)

Punchline: I'm still using that reader program to read my email. 30+ years later. Ha ha.

One of the main reasons linux has a network stack is so that linus could browse usenet from his desk back when he was still in uni (i remember reading this somewhere ill update this with a source as soon as i find it)

edit: found the source

I was on USENET from '89-2005-ish, on various Unix versions. I used trn until strn came out; it has an amazingly useful threaded display, where you can move around posts on a big branching thread to follow replies. strn added scoring, so a file full of rules would up and downvote things (privately) so I'd only see the good stuff up top, and never see a lot of obvious garbage.

There were less capable clients for Windows & such, but if you had the choice you used a text-mode Unix client.

September That Never Ended wasn't great, AOLers were really terrible, but now the entire Internet is AOL-quality, so I doubt it'll make much difference.