ugh.book

Newsgroups 97

alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die

alt.biff.biff.bork.bork.bork

alt.bob-packwood.tongue.tongue.tongue

alt.tv.90210.sucks.sucks.sucks

alt.american.automobile.breakdown.breakdown.

breakdown

As you can see, the joke wears thin rather quickly. Not that that stops any-
one on the Usenet.

Hurling Hierarchies

Usenet originally had two hierarchies, net and fa. The origins of the term
“net” are lost. The “fa” stood for from ARPANET and was a way of receiv-
ing some of the most popular ARPANET mailing lists as netnews. The “fa”
groups were special in that only one site (an overloaded DEC VAX at UCB
that was the computer science department’s main gateway to the ARPA-
NET) was authorized to post the messages. This concept became very use-
ful, so a later release of the Usenet software renamed the fa hierarchy to
mod, where “mod” stood for moderated. The software was changed to for-
ward a message posted to a moderated group to the group’s “moderator”
(specified in a configuration file) who would read the message, check it out
to some degree, and then repost it. To repost, the moderator added a header
that said “Approved” with some text, typically the moderator’s address. Of
course, anyone can forge articles in moderated groups. This does not hap-
pen too often, if only because it is so easy to do so: there is little challenge
in breaking into a safe where the combination is written on the door. Mod-
erated groups were the first close integration of mail and news; they could
be considered among the first hesitant crawls onto the information super-
highway.^2

The term “net” cropped up in Usenet discussions, and an informal caste
system developed. The everyday people, called “net.folk” or “net.deni-
zens,” who mostly read and occasionally posted articles, occupied the low-
est rung. People well known for their particularly insightful, obnoxious, or
prolific postings were called net.personalities. At the top rung were the

(^2) The first crawls, of course, occured on the ARPANET, which had real computers
running real operating systems. Before netnews exploded, the users of MIT-MC,
MIT’s largest and fastest KL-10, were ready to lynch Roger Duffey of the Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory for SF-LOVERS, a national mailing list that was rapidly
taking over all of MC’s night cycles. Ever wonder where the “list-REQUEST” con-
vention and digestification software came from? They came from Roger, trying to
save his hide.