Usenet Newsgroups Part I – I find some Usenet Archives on CD-ROM

I am once again skirting a bit on the edge of the telephone related subjects as well as taking a bit of a divergence from, what had been for a few posts, something of a tale about my career.  But some of it takes place in parallel with my time at Global Village and it is telephone related in that the internet was dial-up for most of us back then.

I am also divert a bit because I am still formulating how to really tell the tale of the next two positions…  but mostly because I found some stuff in a box in the garage while we were getting ready for Thanksgiving.

And what I found were some old CD-ROMs containing archives of Usenet news groups from the early 90s.  Strange times!

A 31 year old data time capsule

This is probably going to be a three-parter because even as I was writing this I kept coming up with additional things to add.  So this will be the intro.

Usenet was, in its own archaic way, something of the precursor of social media.  It was open to anyone (or anyone with the technical means and knowledge) to participate in.  It was divided up into nine top level groups (after the great renaming of 85/86), eight of which faced some form of moderation and the ninth, ALT, which was the wild west of Usenet, where anything was possible.

The primary Usenet groups

ALT did not, in fact, stand for Anarchists, Lunatics and Terrorists, it just seemed that way.

And there were many other locally created groups that had limited distribution.

It was, in many ways, an ideal that many today wish social media today would move towards.  There was no central authority.  It was a distributed network, so did not depend on any one server or organization, but was dispersed among servers all over the internet.  I am sure some fans of the Fediverse and nodding to themselves in a self-congratulatory way even now.

Moderation was generally light, though it varied from news group to news group.  Generally people were good and the only problems were generally the incoming freshman class in the autumn because that was primary source of new users.  They got yelled at for being uncouth in the moderated forums, with snotty self-righteous group moderators telling those that breached expected decorum that they needed to read the FAQ for the group, which was generally published to the group on the first of the month.

In other words, typical forum behavior where those who were there first believe that has given then the inalienable right to project their ideal social conventions on a bunch of strangers who show up later.  They are the insiders and you need to obey and study them if you want to be accepted into the group.

That is a situation that works well with a small, controlled audience.  The forums for a popular video game or Mastodon before Elon Musk bought Twitter, are examples of that, where a few loud and persistent voices can wield influence and shape norms by simply shouting down anybody who falls out of line.  There is always an audience for authoritarians, as we can see these days in real world politics.

As I believe I have mentioned in the past, I was yelled at on Usenet back in 1988 merely for having a cup.portal.com address, that being the product of a commercial company selling access to the sacred groups which were meant to be free of such crass commercial endeavors.  Only those with a legitimate reason were supposed to be allowed access… merely being a student at a university with some level of internet access being the primary legitimate path for most.

Later, when news groups were opened to online services like AOL (the September that never ended), and later when people started getting dial-up internet, many groups were simply overrun by people who were not willing to fall in line because some petty martinet got mad at you for using all caps and demanded you read the FAQ.  A popular revolution overthrows petty tyrants.

Usenet itself was a very big deal by the mid-90s and then, while it still exists, was pretty much destroyed when it came to usefulness by the time Y2K came around.

One aspect of the whole venture was that Usenet was distributed, which meant that you were somewhat dependent on your local admin subscribing to and keeping some back archive of the newsgroups which interested you.

Granted, text doesn’t take up much space, but this was also a completely different era when it came to computer storage.  Back in 1985 in Back to the Future, when Doc Brown shouts about the Flux Capacitor needing 1.21 gigawatts of power, the prefix “giga” (however you chose to pronounce it) wasn’t part of the every day vernacular the way it is today.  Today I have a 5 terabyte physical hard drive sitting on a shelf that I use to back up my computer.  SIX TERABYTES just sitting on a shelf, extra, used just for backups.  And I bought it on a whim because it was cheap in order to replace the 2.1 terabyte unit I had been using.  I have multi-gigabyte micro SD drives sitting around that make the nail on my little toe seem large.

We have come so far that hard drive space, which is something I used to fret about, isn’t something I think about more than once or twice a year.  But back in the day…

At a time when hard drive space looked like it might get to a cost level of a dollar per megabyte of storage (I remember it being a big deal when those Quantum 240MB drives dropped to just over $200 around 1993/94) and many server admins were working on academic budgets (the trend of universities supporting sports and administration staff over anything helpful to academics was already in full swing), even those who were enthusiastic for newsgroups, had to make some hard choices.

The first to go was alt, or at least alt.binaries.  The latter was where files encoded as text could be shared to newsgroups.  There was some concern about software piracy, but mostly it was porn.  The internet was for porn long before there was a musical declaring it.

But it was often just easier to set the local archive to expire after a set time frame.  When Usenet was an exclusive club that did not like outsiders, those dates could be generous.  I remember in the late 80s running out of things to read on Usenet during the summer.

As its popularity increased, the amount of text increased, and the need to trim became a little more pressing.  But when you start deleting stuff, even banal re-litigation of tired old arguments around the presence of pointed ears on elves in the Tolkien universe, people start to freak out.

There was, at that time, no Internet Archive, though there soon would be.  So people took it upon themselves to archive all the groups… except the binaries, because porn and copyright issues… and store it on CD-ROM.

CD-ROM was the first large capacity, semi-permenant, cross platform, removable storage medium available for computers.  At 640-700MB of capacity, it was huge in an era when 20MB hard drives were still around, 40MB drives just started to become a standard, and 80MB drives were an extra-cost option.

Yes, they were slow.  The default 1x drive speed was 150,000bps.  Faster that a 2400bps modem, but comically slow when compare to hard drives, where we were already in an ongoing pissing match between manufacturers about access and transfer speeds.  But the CD-ROM’s ability to hold a mass of data was unmatched at the time.

A company called Sterling Software which was mostly known for development tools (and which was later acquired by Computer Associates, the one time leader in zombie software extortion… the Gamigo of enterprise software packages, if you get that reference… and which was later scooped up by Broadcom) started packaging up CD-ROMs of newsgroups and selling them.

This, of course, made people angry, as commerce always does.  The purity of the platform was being sullied and angry people added statements to their .sig files explicitly refusing permission for any commercial reproduction of their posts that they otherwise flung for free on the internet where they were being read and archived with any notice of what these sorts of things.

The feeling is always that SOMEBODY is getting rich off of your incredibly inane prattle, which is naturally utter bollocks.  The only value 99.9% of individuals add is bulk, mere heft to the size count of the archive.  This is why I don’t get worked up when my own site gets scraped because I’m already giving it away for free.

Anyway, despite the protestations about greed, Sterling wasn’t making bank on these CDs because the subscription price was reasonable enough that I signed up for about 18 months.  I unsubscribed when I was getting 3-4 CD-ROMs a month in the mail and they started stacking up, unopened, because it turns out what somebody said on the internet approximately six months ago isn’t all that compelling.

I am not sure why I subscribed to it, beyond it seemed like a neat idea and I and about 10 degrees off in my life from becoming Jason Scott and trying to archive and save everything.  I am just too lazy to devote my life to it, so what you get are posts like this where I try to preserve snapshots in my memory before I forget them.

I was an active Usenet user and I used to dial into my ISP multiple times a day to pick up the latest messages using a UUCP reader called uAccess that would download everything to my local computer so I could read them at my leisure.

uAccess from ICE Engineering

I do not know what became of ICE Engineering.  That, by the way, is two floppies.  I put the version 1.5 floppy behind the version 1.6 floppy to show the company name and info. (I also found a box of floppies in the same banker’s box as the Usenet CDs.)

Anyway, I subscribed just as Usenet was on its major upswing, just before the September that never ended, before the crowds would wash away all attempts by the old guard to enforce their social mores by mere self-important declarations.  (There is a theme in my life of being both against chaos and against petty authority.)

The CD-ROMs, as noted, began to pile up rapidly.  The sample disk I have been using, which is the image at the top of this post, covers October 27, 1992 through November 5, 1992 inclusive, which is just ten days of newsgroup activity MINUS the binaries groups.

I made some vague, hand waving statements about drive space up above, so the question probably comes down to how much space did a mere ten days take on that CD-ROM?

I popped it into my optical drive… because I still have a PC with an optical drive… it may be aimed at DVDs and BluRay disks, but it is still capable of reading an ISO 9660 CD-ROM… when it wakes up and decides it is still alive… and took a look at the properties for the disk.

602 MB of Usenet text

Two weeks of Usenet newsgroups… again, no binaries groups… ate up a little over 600MB of drive space.  That is kind of a lot of data.  Enough to be a concern for the system admin keeping an eye on drive space.  Enough for somebody to set things to expire rather more quickly than you might expect.

The next question is, of course, what the hell is on that disk that is taking up 600MB of drive space?

That will be the topic for the next post, and I am not just doing that to leave you hanging.  Our daughter is home for the weekend and I want to spend some time with her before cranking out another 2,000 words.

Also, I want to spend some time exploring the contents of the disk and maybe see if I can find a compatible Usenet news reader that can work with the data.  It is currently in the format it would be on the server, with all the messages as individual files in the spool directory.

So if you have suggestions about a reader that might work, leave me a comment below.  I could open them all with Notepad++, but I do not really want to do that.

I will end by saying that while, at one point, I had 40-50 of these disks, during a move I tossed most of them in the trash… all of them still sealed in their CD cases.  I did keep a dozen of them, ranging from late 1992 into 1993.  I wouldn’t fret over the lost ones.  The Internet Archive probably grabbed most of those messages anyway.

Next time, we see what is there to be seen.

The tales so far:

• Hanging on the Telephone
• Calling the Mall
• Finding Friends with the Popcorn Lady
• Jenny and the FCC
• What Your Area Code Used to Say About Your Location
• I Get a Modem then Start a BBS
• Tech Support at the Village
• Dominating the PowerBook Modem Market
• The Death of eWorld
• The Great Dial Tone Drought of 96
• When the Modem Business Ran Out at the Village
• The Village Attempts to Move Beyond Modems
• Anecdotes from the Village