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

Remembering Spaceship Warlock

Back, more than 20 years ago, there was an interlude in the succession of jobs that somehow became my career, where I had to take some time out and work retail.  Again.

It was the early 90s and the Cold War was over.  My classes in the Soviet studies program were turned into a few semesters of obscure trivia.  (Details of the organization of GOSPLAN anybody?) And one of the first results of the so-called “peace dividend” was a recession in Valley.  Before there was Fairchild Semiconductor to rebel against or the high tech boom that renamed the Santa Clara Valley from “The Valley of Heart’s Delight” to “Silicon Valley,” it was aerospace defense contractors who provided the economic power to build the houses and strip malls over the orchards of my grandparents.  It was the influx of companies like Lockheed that took the cheap farm land of the valley and turned a pack of sleepy little farm towns into a carpet of tract houses.  A hundred suburbs in search of a city as they say.

Anyway, I was out of work not because of the recession but because my previous company lost a lawsuit that caused to boss to call us all into the production area to tell us to clear out our desks and go home.  We were all laid off.

The recession came into play in finding a new job.  With the idea that any job was better than no job, I applied, and got a position, at a local computer retailer called ComputerWare, which specialized in Macintosh computers.

Okay, I swear I will actually get to the game itself, but there is a stage to be set for this.  There will be pictures and links to videos, all after some more background text.

Now where was I?

Ah, yes, ComputerWare.   As far as career interludes go, it was a pretty good deal.

Okay, the pay was bad.  The hours were… well… retail, which meant being there evenings and weekends.  And it was retail.  The general public was allowed to wander in the door, and if you have ever had to work with the general public, then you know what I mean.

But on the flip side, it was a time of Macintosh enthusiasm.  I was a fan of the Mac, and ran a Macintosh BBS out of my home (which is what got me the job pretty quickly, I was somebody who knew about modems when modems were suddenly becoming a big thing), and ComputerWare was a focus of this enthusiasm.  It was a time more akin to the hobbiest days of the 80s than the Apple Store chic of today.  Famous people would show up.

I didn’t work at the Palo Alto store where Apple luminaries like Guy Kawasaki, or musicians like Todd Rundgren would drop by regularly.  But we got our fair share of notables down in the Sunnyvale store.  I met some members of the Grateful Dead (Mac heads!), while Steve Wozniak used to show up with his kids during the generally very quiet Sunday shift and drop a thousand dollars or more on software he would pull off the shelf with abandon.  He was especially interested in the CD-ROM software and would buy out the one copy (or the demo copy) of anything he did not already have.

Not that famous people were there all the time.  And frankly, the enthusiasts were more important and often more fun.  We had a pile of regulars who would show up all the time to see and talk about what was new.  On Saturday morning the local Mac user group, A32 (for “Apple 32-bit users”), would adjourn from their weekly meeting and show up at our store to just be Mac geeks among the flock.

And there was so much new stuff showing up that we all take for granted these days.  Apple was about to launch the PowerBook laptop computers which would basically define what a laptop computer looks like through to today.  QuickTime was about to bring easy video capture and playback to the masses (killing off another company I used to work for).  Video cards and displays were unlike anything you could get elsewhere, and Adobe was already selling Photoshop 2.0 for the Mac.

And then there were CD-ROMs, which interested Steve Wozniak so much.

This was back in the infancy of CD-ROM drives.

At that point in time, computers did not come with an optical drive.  That was a standard feature a good four years down the road.  Your computer came with a 1.44MB floppy drive, which was how you loaded software onto the machine (unless you were a real odd ball and called BBSes and downloaded software!) and a hard drive of a capacity somewhere between 20MB and 120MB.

CD-ROM drives were external peripherals, and they were expensive.

At ComputerWare we carried two in stock.  The first was the Apple model, A SCSI device that ran close to $500 in price.  The other was an off-brand that I can no longer recall… Plexor? Plextor? Something like that.  That one came in just under $400.

This was 1991.  Those were expensive devices.  They were 1x speed, so reading data was slower that you can possibly imagine.  And writing data? Forget about it!

I think I need to emphasize the speed.  In the age of broadband, the speed of a 1x CD-ROM drive seems ludicrously slow, at 150K/sec.  That was the standard created for music CDs.  At that rate, copying a 44 minute album to your hard drive would take… 44 minutes.  And, of course, you couldn’t copy it to your hard drive because it was probably too small in any case.  CDs could be 650MB in size, and your hard drive, as I mentioned above, likely only had a capacity in the 20-120MB range.

And that 150K/sec number was an “everything goes right” throughput number.  A music CD is generally optimized so that the data can read with a minimum of seek time.  Random data, like an image of somebody’s hard drive or an Apple developers CD could take what seems like ages just to display, much less load.  At the time the Mac world was still using SCSI-1 for hard drives, which is very slow compared to today’s interfaces, like SATA.  And 1x CD-ROM drives seemed positively glacial compared to SCSI-1.

“Freaking slow” does not begin to cover the topic.

And there was not a lot you could do with CD-ROM drives.  There were a few titles out there, and they were all very expensive.  They were expensive because volume was low.  Somebody dumped an encyclopedia onto a CD, because the one thing CD-ROMs did well was hold a lot of data, coming it at 650MB.  This was at a time when a raw 1GB hard drive was between a brick and a cinder block in size, about as quiet as an electric razor, and was priced over the $2,000 mark.  But the encyclopedia wasn’t very good by all accounts.  There were the Apple developer CDs.  Those were fun, if slow.  And you could play your music CDs on your drive, if you so desired.

It was a classic situation of young technology having neither matured enough nor having found its niche.

And yet, in this environment… insane cost, low utility, miserable performance… I could guarantee we would sell at least one, often two, of our CD-ROM drives every weekend.  All I had to do was get a hold of the one Mac on the sales floor that had a drive and insert the store copy of Spaceship Warlock, and it would sing its sirens tune. (An annoying tune that my boss would tell me to turn the hell down.)  It would sell the hardware for me.

Spaaaace-ship Warlock!

Looking at this game today, you might wonder how this was possible.

The graphics weren’t bad, but low quality by today’s standards.  There wasn’t much of a game to the whole thing.  The dialog was just bad.  And worst of all it cost, in 1991, $95 and required a $400 piece of hardware just to play it.

Wait, $95 for this?

But at the time, in the context of 1991, it was something amazing.  The game promised a lot.

All this and more!

And it delivered on all of the promises.  Granted, some of them, like the pogo space shuttle, were pretty much just cut scenes.  Then again, cut scenes of this quality were a new thing.

“Cut Scenes” actually describes a lot of Spaceship Warlock.

The cover even described it as an “Interactive Movie,” though we didn’t have an “Interactive Movie” section, so it got stuck with the games.

It was almost all atmosphere with very little game.

But the atmosphere was just right.  You started in a dark city that you could explore.  You could not range that far and wide, but there were establishments to enter and little things to do outside of the story line.  This theme was kept up for most of the environments, which is part of what made it engaging.

And then there was the style, which gave a serious Blade Runner vibe in the city (thanks in part to the hover vehicles that took off just like those in the movie) that sucked people into the game.

So it was almost any given Saturday at ComputerWare, Sunnyvale, some well paid male tech worker in his 30s to 50s would be ensnared.  For the married ones, I could practically hear the thought process going on in their head, which went something like this:

Must have this game!

Game plus drive is $500.  Wife will kill me!  Cannot rationalize this purchase.

Wait, CD-ROM encyclopedia.  Encyclopedia plus drive is $500, but it is an advanced educational tool for the child / children.  This I can justify!

Game is then just a small indulgence for me.  I win!

Single men were less complex.

Must have this game!  I am single and well paid!  I win!

So once they had to give up their seat at the game, they would sidle up to me, inquire about the encyclopedia and other educational software (the Living Book CD-ROM version of Just Grandma and Me became a required add-on for anybody with small kids when it came out), and then have me pull a copy of the CD and a drive to purchase.

And then, in that tone of voice men sometimes use when asking for condoms or alcohol at stores where they are kept behind the counter, they would say, “Oh, and do you have a copy of Spaceship Warlock?”

Of course I did.  I wouldn’t bother loading up the store copy on one of the demo machines if we didn’t, as NOT having a copy would pooch any sale.

I was at this job for less than a year, November to July as I recall, and I must have personally handled 20 such sales  on Saturdays at the store.   That doesn’t seem like a lot, but this was a very expensive luxury item, essentially a $500 game.

And what did people get for their $500?

I still have the CD-ROM.   The pictures in this post are scans of my beat up copy of the game… (I was single and not well paid, but I got it anyway.  The employee discount brought the price down, but it was still expensive.  I think I literally paid more into ComputerWare than I earned while working there.)

But I have no way of actually playing it.  Somebody else figured it out though, and while it wasn’t perfect (The animations do not always render correctly.  This is especially noticeable when flying cars take off in the city.) it does give a sense of the game.  There is, of course, the intro:

If the CD was left running in the drive, it would play the intro music score over and over, which would drive my boss crazy.  I had to keep the speakers low until the key demographic was in the store.

And then there is game play itself.

The play through it fairly direct, going straight for the key points of interest without much exploration.  Still, it gives a sense of what the game was like.

And if you really want to see the rest, there are videos covering the game through to the end.

Spaceship Warlock Playlist

That was what passed for cutting edge in 1991.

Color!  Stereo sound!  Engaging environments!

The creators of the game later got into a lawsuit over who deserved royalties after the game became a success.

The authors

Mike Saenz also did the Virtual Valerie series… I am sure porn would have sold even more CD-ROM players, but this was a family environment… along with a graphic novel made up of rendered 3D images called Donna Matrix… which was also porn.  He certainly had the internet figured out in advance.

And then… and then the march of technology carried on.  I have seen Blu-Ray discs with menu systems more complex than Spaceship Warlock, and games… well… the level of depth and detail available has long since surpassed this game.  Today it is a dinosaur, an oddity, a throw back to what is now ancient history in video games.

But it isn’t very often that I have felt as captured and immersed in a game as I was back in 1991.