ugh.book

5 Snoozenet...............................................................................

Snoozenet

I Post, Therefore I Am

“Usenet is a cesspool, a dung heap.”

—Patrick A. Townson

We’re told that the information superhighway is just around the corner.

Nevertheless, we already have to deal with the slow-moving garbage trucks

clogging up the highway’s arteries. These trash-laden vehicles are NNTP

packets and compressed UUCP batches, shipping around untold gigabytes

a day of trash. This trash is known, collectively, as Usenet.

Netnews and Usenet: Anarchy Through Growth ........................ I Post, Therefore I Am

In the late 1970s, two graduate students in North Carolina set up a tele-

phone link between the machines at their universities (UNC and Duke) and

wrote a shell script to exchange messages. Unlike mail, the messages were

stored in a public area where everyone could read them. Posting a message

at any computer sent a copy of it to every single system on the fledgling

network.