I recall the good old days when I used to receive Usenet news. I was
first confronted with Usenet back in nineteen eighty-something whilst
traveling for Nixdorf Computer AG to Singapore. The offices there had a
feed which was brought in via satellite (rather cool in those days). I recall
being quite impressed at the volume and content of the newsgroups which
interested me (mainly the comp.*
hierarchy). Back at the ranch, I knew I
needed that too. I purchased a Telebit Trailblazer (the modem to own in
those days, when one wanted to transport UUCP effectively) at horrendous cost
(I seem to recall it cost the equivalent of EUR(Euro) 1,260 at the time), set
up an upstream UUCP partner, and started slurping it in. In those days I
even posted some code to alt.sources
and comp.sources.unix
. Today I
don’t read Usenet news feeds any longer, probably due to my workload. I depend
on RSS feeds for interesting snippets, and when the whim gets me, I can use
Google Groups (who purchased the rights to the Usenet archives back to
the early days of Usenet) to browse or search for something. If you look
carefully you’ll be able to tell some of the companies I’ve worked for ;-)
.