I've had a great time on Lemmy since I joined over 2y ago. But well, can't keep all the fun to ourselves, right? :) Now this place is all yours too. Welcome aboard!

[–] xumsixle@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

thanks

[–] Garrathian 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I've never heard of the term eternal september until now, that's pretty neat. Makes me wonder what 1980s usenet groups/conversations looked like. I wonder if DOS or other OS's at the time had a navigable interface for it

[–] xumsixle@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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

[–] barubary@infosec.exchange 2 points 2 years ago

@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 😀

[–] davefischer 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] mdhughes@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] koncertejo@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

Currently everyone is talking about reddit here, which really exposes why the recent wave of people is here. Prior to this it was mostly leftist shitposting mixed with general fediverse discussion. I think the Mastodon side of the fediverse likely experienced something similar in October last year, but I can't really speak to the culture before that because that's the wave that I came over in.

I will say that even though there's a lot of reddit spam right now, this amount of content and discussion is still way more entertaining than it was before. And Lemmygrad is still hanging out in their own little corner. It's just bigger than that now.

[–] bluuit@bluuit.org 3 points 2 years ago

i hope so

[–] heartlessevil@lemmy.one 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wouldn't this be like the 1000th eternal september? It happens all the time.

[–] xumsixle@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

ive never seen any "please dont join here, its getting really crammed" notices before

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