Alt.massive.flamage 99for an administrator to drop those groups. Of course—that was the point!
At the time most of Europe was connected to the United States via a long-
distance phone call and people in, say, Scandinavia did not care to read
about—let alone participate in—discussion of Roe v. Wade.
Even though this appeared to be yet another short-sighted, short-term
Unix-style patch, and even though the users objected, Usenet was con-
trolled by Unix-thinking admins, so the changes happened. It went surpris-
ingly smoothly, mostly accomplished in a few weeks. (It wasn’t clear
where everything should go. After a flamefest regarding the disposition of
the newsgroup for the care and feeding of aquaria, two groups sprouted
up—sci.aquaria and rec.aquaria.) For people who didn’t agree, software
at major net sites silently rewrote articles to conform to the new organiza-
tion. The name overhaul is called the Great Renaming.
Terms like “net.god” are still used, albeit primarily by older hands. In these
rude and crude times, however, you’re more likely to see the terms like
“net.jerk.”
Alt.massive.flamage ..................................................................
At the time for the Great Renaming, Brian Reid had been moderating a
group named “mod.gourmand.” People from around the would sent their
favorite recipes to Brian, who reviewed them and posted them in a
consistent format. He also provide scripts to save, typeset, and index the
recipes thereby creating a group personal cookbook—the ultimate vanity
press. Over 500 recipes were published. Under the new scheme,
mod.gourmand became “rec.food.recipes” and Brian hated that prosaic
name. John Gilmore didn’t like the absence of an unmoderated source
group—people couldn’t give away code, it had to go through a middleman.
Brian and John got together with some other admins and created the “alt,”
for alternative, hierarchy. As you might expect, it started with sites in the
San Francisco Bay Area, that hotbed of 1960s radicalism and foment. So,
alt.gourmand and alt.sources were created. The major rule in “alt” is that
anyone may create a group and anarchy (in the truest sense) reigns: each
site decides what to carry.
Usenet had become a slow-moving parody of itself. As a case in point, the
Usenet cookbook didn’t appear in rec.food.recipes and Brian quit moder-
ating alt.gourmand fairly rapidly. Perhaps he went on a diet? As for
alt.sources, people now complain if the postings don’t contain “official”