Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey Thearin,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
Speaker 1: an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are
Speaker 1: you today? I thought we'd talked about something that's both
Speaker 1: a throwback and it's still very much current, which is
Speaker 1: the networked communication system called us net. While I think
Speaker 1: just about everyone is familiar with certain Internet related services,
Speaker 1: you know, like email or web browsing, maybe to a
Speaker 1: lesser extent, things like FTP, that sort of thingt I
Speaker 1: think depends on the person. Some of you may have
Speaker 1: only heard or seen references to UNT, some of you
Speaker 1: may never have heard of it at all, And of
Speaker 1: course I think some of you are probably very familiar
Speaker 1: with it. In fact, from what I understand you, SET
Speaker 1: is actually kind of experiencing some lot of a renaissance
Speaker 1: among younger users like millennial and gen Z users. I
Speaker 1: would not know. I'm gen X, so I'm out of
Speaker 1: the loop everywhere. We're not even included in those articles
Speaker 1: that are about all the different generations and how they
Speaker 1: differ from each other. Gen X is always left out
Speaker 1: of that, so I don't know what's going on with
Speaker 1: my own generation. But I'm getting off track. So usenet
Speaker 1: is older than the Web. When Tim berners Lee introduced
Speaker 1: the technology that would underlie the Worldwide Web in the
Speaker 1: early nineties, Usenet had already been a thing for more
Speaker 1: than a decade at that point. So our story begins
Speaker 1: in North Carolina, primarily at Duke University. You had a
Speaker 1: couple of graduate students at Duke named Jim Ellis and
Speaker 1: Tom Truscott, and they were experimenting. They were creating a protocol.
Speaker 1: And remember, a protocol is a set of rules, a
Speaker 1: set of instructions that a computer follows, and the protocols
Speaker 1: define how computers do certain tasks. They were working on
Speaker 1: one called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol or UUCP. Now,
Speaker 1: you also had a student at the University of North
Speaker 1: Carolina Chapel Hill named Stephen Bellevian who would create software
Speaker 1: that would leverage this protocol and allow people to interface
Speaker 1: with it. He would become very important in the creation
Speaker 1: of us neet. In fact, also he ended up writing
Speaker 1: several articles about the history of us net that were
Speaker 1: incredibly useful when I was putting this piece together. He
Speaker 1: wrote them for a circleid dot com, so you can
Speaker 1: go there and read. I think it's a nine part
Speaker 1: series where he goes into detail, sometimes great technical detail,
Speaker 1: which I will not be doing for this episode. I
Speaker 1: think it goes beyond the scope of what I want
Speaker 1: to do. Plus I'd be more likely to mess things
Speaker 1: up than to save them correctly. Anyway, this protocol made
Speaker 1: it possible for different computers to exchange files and messages
Speaker 1: if they were networked to one another. And by computers
Speaker 1: I'm really talking about like mainframes and mini computers at
Speaker 1: this point, primarily mini computers. Now, a mini computer is
Speaker 1: not the same thing as a desktop or a laptop.
Speaker 1: Those would be micro computers. A mini computer was still
Speaker 1: a big old honkin computer system, like back in the seventies.
Speaker 1: So a mainframe could potentially take up an entire room
Speaker 1: or sometimes even an entire floor of a building. That's
Speaker 1: how big mainframe computers could be. A mini computer might
Speaker 1: be as small quote unquote as the size of an
Speaker 1: entire desk or maybe a couple of refrigerators. These machines
Speaker 1: often had pretty significant computing power for the time, but
Speaker 1: they were not nearly as powerful as mainframes, or did
Speaker 1: they have the capacity to process as much information per
Speaker 1: unit of time as a mainframe could. They were, however,
Speaker 1: marginally not marginally, they were significantly less expensive than mainframes,
Speaker 1: so they became a core component of computer science departments
Speaker 1: of various you know, schools that were specifically centered around technology.
Speaker 1: One of those mini computers was the PDP eleven from
Speaker 1: DC and it could run the Unix operating system. So
Speaker 1: you know, there's lots of different opring systems out there.
Speaker 1: Unix is one of the big ones, often used in
Speaker 1: things like like web servers and things of that nature.
Speaker 1: Unix and Linux, whereas you know, we're mostly familiar with
Speaker 1: either Mac up Brain system or Windows, depending on the
Speaker 1: type of machine you use. Anyway, the mini computer PDP
Speaker 1: eleven was the sort of computer system that graduate students
Speaker 1: had access to. This this was before many computers would
Speaker 1: be powerful enough to do anything significant in the computing world.
Speaker 1: Like they were great for hobbyists. They had lots of
Speaker 1: useful tasks, but they were extremely limited. They would not
Speaker 1: be useful in a research capacity for the most part.
Speaker 1: So the students also had access to dial up modems,
Speaker 1: which at that time ran at a blistering three hundred
Speaker 1: bps that stands for bits per second, so the three
Speaker 1: hundred bits per second is actually not blistering. That was
Speaker 1: just a joke. Also, at this point, hardware displays were
Speaker 1: really rare. Like computer minors, you just didn't really have
Speaker 1: them in a lot of these systems. So for a
Speaker 1: lot of these mini computers, you would not get your
Speaker 1: results displayed on a screen. Instead, it would print on
Speaker 1: a sheet of paper. So you would make some code
Speaker 1: and then you would get a print out of results
Speaker 1: and that would be when you'd find out whether or
Speaker 1: not your code was good. If it wasn't, it had
Speaker 1: to go back and fix it and then print out again.
Speaker 1: It was pretty wild stuff back in those days. Well,
Speaker 1: it gets even better than that. The original use net
Speaker 1: network relied on acoustic coupler modems. So this is the
Speaker 1: kind of modem that, as the name implies, uses sound
Speaker 1: acoustics to make connections between computers. So each computer would
Speaker 1: have a modem that would have a coupler, and the
Speaker 1: coupler would hold a handset of a landline telephone, so
Speaker 1: you would take the telephone out of its cradle. You
Speaker 1: would put the telephone into the coupler the right way,
Speaker 1: so that the microphones on one side, the speakers on
Speaker 1: the other. You would then dial the number of the
Speaker 1: computer system that you were hoping to connect to, which
Speaker 1: also would have a handset and a coupler, and then
Speaker 1: your computer would make noises indicating either a zero or
Speaker 1: a one, so bits in other words, through the coupler,
Speaker 1: and these noise would travel over the phone lines, just
Speaker 1: as voice communication would if two people were just talking
Speaker 1: on the phone. So the motive on the other end
Speaker 1: would receive these noises and the coupler would convert them
Speaker 1: into voltage signals that the computer would then interpret as
Speaker 1: bits as zeros are wants, and you could have communication
Speaker 1: between computers this way. Now, the reason why the students
Speaker 1: went with this specific method wasn't because that's the only
Speaker 1: technology they had access to. Instead, it was because they
Speaker 1: were trying to get around some pretty tough regulatory hurdles.
Speaker 1: Back in those days, AT and T essentially had a
Speaker 1: monopoly over phone communications within the United States, so this
Speaker 1: approach helped sidestep some obstacles they would otherwise have faced
Speaker 1: when trying to connect the systems together. Right because you're
Speaker 1: doing a voice call rather than a data call, at
Speaker 1: least as far as the telephone system is concerned. It's
Speaker 1: just sending signals of sound across You're not using it
Speaker 1: as a data connection per se. And so it was
Speaker 1: a way to kind of sidestep the very steep prices
Speaker 1: you would have to pay in order to have a
Speaker 1: data connection. So, by the way, AT and T tried
Speaker 1: desperately to fight that and to make it so that
Speaker 1: they could still charge enormous amounts of money for those connections,
Speaker 1: but ultimately they lost that particular court battle. Anyway, Stephen
Speaker 1: Bellvan wrote software to create a sort of client, kind
Speaker 1: of like a web browser. It was a client that
Speaker 1: would serve as the interface for use net and the
Speaker 1: UUCP protocol, which I know, I just was repetitive. It's
Speaker 1: like saying ATM machine. And also the computer systems and
Speaker 1: modems were all doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes
Speaker 1: and stalling the software on different mini computers made it
Speaker 1: possible to exchange information and files between these mini computers INI,
Speaker 1: not A and Y. In fact, there were not very
Speaker 1: many computers connected to use net at all initially, so
Speaker 1: they called it use net, which is short for Users Network.
Speaker 1: The first three computers connected to the network were in
Speaker 1: Duke University Duke Medical School and the University of North
Speaker 1: Carolina Chapel Hill. Obviously it would grow from there. But
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to really sit down and explain what
Speaker 1: use net is and a bit about how it's organized,
Speaker 1: to really get an understanding of what makes it special.
Speaker 1: So if you're at all familiar with Reddit, the description
Speaker 1: of use net is going to sound a little bit
Speaker 1: familiar to you on a surface level. So the use
Speaker 1: net network consists of discussion groups. These are called newsgroups.
Speaker 1: These would be a lot like subreddits on Reddit. So
Speaker 1: each newsgroup is dedicated to a specific subject or topic.
Speaker 1: Users can read and at least in most cases post
Speaker 1: to newsgroups. There are limitations on that. I'll talk about
Speaker 1: that in a bit. And you can subscribe to specific
Speaker 1: newsgroups so that you can keep up with the new
Speaker 1: stuff that's posted to them. At least you can do that. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not how it worked initially, because originally the client
Speaker 1: that Stephen Bellvan programmed was limited to updating the information
Speaker 1: based on the last time you access the newsgroup according
Speaker 1: to the computer's logs, and it would give you all
Speaker 1: the updates, so you couldn't just jump around and grab
Speaker 1: just the stuff you were interested in in the one
Speaker 1: newsgroup that you were Let's say that you are just
Speaker 1: absolutely fascinated with Dudgeons and dragons, and that's the only
Speaker 1: newsgroup you wanted to be part of, so that was
Speaker 1: all you were focusing on. Well, with Bellevan's client, you
Speaker 1: would get everything, not just that newsgroup. The reason for
Speaker 1: this is that Bellvan felt that usenet wouldn't get that
Speaker 1: much traffic. He thought maybe it would generate an article
Speaker 1: or two per day, people would write a piece for
Speaker 1: use net, or maybe you would get two pieces in
Speaker 1: a day, and so it'd be a very small update
Speaker 1: each day. So there's no reason to worry about it
Speaker 1: because he was you know, at the time, we were
Speaker 1: talking about three computers, and again there were many computers.
Speaker 1: They were ones that you had to have access to
Speaker 1: as a student to be able to even use in
Speaker 1: the first place, so by by definition, it was limited.
Speaker 1: Plus this is a you know, a newsgroup you would
Speaker 1: only have access to if you had booked time with
Speaker 1: that mini computer, which was a process. Right, you had
Speaker 1: to access it, and that required you to sign up,
Speaker 1: and you know, sometimes you had a log book and
Speaker 1: everything so that you could have access to it so
Speaker 1: that other students would know that at that time you
Speaker 1: were accessing the computer system. Anyway, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break. When we come back, I'll talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about some interesting comparison's contrasts with Reddit. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're so. Reddit tends to be a place where users
Speaker 1: share links to interesting stuff to a relevant subreddit reddit,
Speaker 1: and then conversation will flow from there. So a fairly
Speaker 1: typical Reddit post might have a headline associated with a
Speaker 1: news story, and you could click through and that will
Speaker 1: actually take you to the news story itself, or you
Speaker 1: can click into the messages and read the conversation around
Speaker 1: the news item. But I mean, you could just have
Speaker 1: a Reddit post that just is an original piece, a
Speaker 1: user generated piece. Maybe it includes a photo or a
Speaker 1: gift or something like that. But that's typically the way
Speaker 1: reddits work, especially in the subreds I go to. Those
Speaker 1: are almost always about sharing articles and links to interesting stuff. Well,
Speaker 1: us neet was just originally limited to plain old text.
Speaker 1: There was no Worldwide Web yet, so you couldn't hyperlink
Speaker 1: to a web page. Web pages didn't exist initially, you
Speaker 1: couldn't upload a file to use net Folks did see
Speaker 1: that would be really useful if you could do that,
Speaker 1: if you could create a way to upload and download
Speaker 1: files to and from us net, but it would require
Speaker 1: a bit of work in order to make this possible.
Speaker 1: As such, students started to work on a way to
Speaker 1: allow for the uploading and downloading of binary files. So
Speaker 1: binary refers to basic computer language. You know, it's zeros
Speaker 1: and ones. Those zeros and ones can represent anything, you know.
Speaker 1: We're talking everything from software to orchestral symphonies to the
Speaker 1: dancing baby gif that was all the rage on the
Speaker 1: internet thanks to Ali mcbeil man. I'm dating myself with
Speaker 1: this episode. So these smarty pants students came up with
Speaker 1: a way to encode binary data into text because that's
Speaker 1: what us net could handle. It could handle text. So
Speaker 1: you would take your program. You would then have to
Speaker 1: convert your program into binary code. You would have to
Speaker 1: convert the binary code into text and then upload that.
Speaker 1: Someone else could then grab that thread of posts and
Speaker 1: then use a decoder to decode the text back into binary,
Speaker 1: and then finally convert the binary into whatever the original
Speaker 1: file format was. So there are a lot of steps,
Speaker 1: but it would work. But there was a catch because
Speaker 1: used that articles have a limit as to how much
Speaker 1: data they can hold. So typically uploading a file means
Speaker 1: that the file is going to be split across multiple posts,
Speaker 1: and by multiple I mean potentially lots of posts, because
Speaker 1: if you're trying to download something significantly large, like today,
Speaker 1: if you were trying to download a high resolution video,
Speaker 1: you could be talking about thousands of posts that make
Speaker 1: up this video. So part of the issue was that
Speaker 1: early encoding methods would inflate the file size significantly, by
Speaker 1: like forty percent, so the file would get even larger
Speaker 1: because of the encoding method Now, fortunately, folks would come
Speaker 1: up with alternatives and they would find ways to encode
Speaker 1: the binary into texts that would reduce that overhead. Also,
Speaker 1: keep in mind that when us net was a new thing,
Speaker 1: the folks who were using it were relying on those
Speaker 1: dial up modems. They had really hefty limitations and how
Speaker 1: much data they could download per second, so we weren't
Speaker 1: typically talking about big files at least in the early
Speaker 1: days of use net. Anyway, the support for binary files
Speaker 1: meant that us neet would become a way to communicate
Speaker 1: not just through text, but through files as well. This
Speaker 1: is as you might imagine that led to some issues
Speaker 1: with piracy, but well that's a matter for another episode,
Speaker 1: so we're just going to move on and keep on
Speaker 1: talking about us net. So a fundamental feature of us
Speaker 1: net is that it's not a centralized service. This is
Speaker 1: another way we can contrast it with Reddit. While Reddit
Speaker 1: has some surface level similarities to us net, beneath the
Speaker 1: hood things are very different. So Reddit is essentially centralized.
Speaker 1: It means that the service ultimately runs on servers that
Speaker 1: Reddit either owns or leases from, like a cloud competing
Speaker 1: provider such as Amazon Web Services. But the point is
Speaker 1: the underlying foundation for Reddit is in a centralized group
Speaker 1: of servers. Centralized in this case doesn't necessarily mean geographically
Speaker 1: by the way. That's because networking gets all whibbly wobbly,
Speaker 1: but it does mean that's in this definite, finite number
Speaker 1: of servers, and that is where Reddit lives. Use net,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, is decentralized. Anyone could create a
Speaker 1: use net server. You'd have to download the right software,
Speaker 1: but you could do it. So the way use networks
Speaker 1: is more like a peer to peer network. So let's
Speaker 1: say you create a use net server. You connect your
Speaker 1: server to the use net network at large, You indicate
Speaker 1: which news groups in particular you want to prioritize on
Speaker 1: your server, and your server will regularly ping other servers,
Speaker 1: the bigger nodes in use Net's network to look for
Speaker 1: updates to those newsgroups and thus pull in new information
Speaker 1: whenever there is new information, and then your users on
Speaker 1: your server can access that. Now, let's say that your
Speaker 1: users on your server create a newsgroup that gets a
Speaker 1: lot of popularity, and eventually other servers on the us
Speaker 1: net network are interested in that newsgroup, so they start
Speaker 1: pigging your server and they get updates on your user's
Speaker 1: newsgroup and they serve it to their users. So the
Speaker 1: whole network is decentralized and to an extent asynchronous. You
Speaker 1: might access a newsgroup and read an article and some
Speaker 1: of the posts beneath it, and then you decide you
Speaker 1: want to write your own response, So you create your
Speaker 1: own response and you send it to post. Now that's
Speaker 1: going to go to whatever server you're connected to through usnet,
Speaker 1: But that doesn't automatically populate across every use net server
Speaker 1: that carries that newsgroup. That you have to wait for
Speaker 1: them all to sort of synchronize, which means that they're
Speaker 1: there's going to be a time where some versions of
Speaker 1: that news group are going to have your reply, some
Speaker 1: versions are not, and it means that other people might reply.
Speaker 1: They might even make the same point you made. If
Speaker 1: you're unlucky, they might make it better than you did,
Speaker 1: and then you just seem to be, you know, repeating
Speaker 1: what someone else said. But when you wrote your post,
Speaker 1: you had that that reply didn't exist, or at least
Speaker 1: you hadn't seen it yet because yours had not synchronized
Speaker 1: with the most recent information. So it gets a little
Speaker 1: bit like muddy when you're talking about, you know, what's
Speaker 1: the latest information on us net. Well, it really depends
Speaker 1: upon which server you're talking about and whether or not
Speaker 1: that was the point where new material was generated or
Speaker 1: if in fact it's waiting to be propagated across the
Speaker 1: entire network. Now. One benefit of this approach is that
Speaker 1: us net is somewhat shielded against censorship and interference because
Speaker 1: there's no one to shut down it's distributed right now.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that an authority cannot try, and even
Speaker 1: in extreme cases, sometimes succeed to take stuff off us net.
Speaker 1: But it ain't easy. It is a pretty tough thing
Speaker 1: to do because there's not any one entity you can
Speaker 1: go to like you can't. You could go to Reddit
Speaker 1: and demand Reddit remove something, which you may or may
Speaker 1: not work, depending on the nature of the thing, but
Speaker 1: you can't really do that with us net because again,
Speaker 1: it's not one single entity that controls use net. It's
Speaker 1: it's a hive mind. The structure of newsgroups actually follows hierarchies,
Speaker 1: and that is like large categorizations. Right today, you could
Speaker 1: argue the most famous use net hierarchy is the ALT hierarchy,
Speaker 1: which is funny because the ALT in this case stands
Speaker 1: for alternative, specifically an alternative to the big seven newsgroup
Speaker 1: hierarchies that are seen as the more establish but whatever,
Speaker 1: that's not how everything started. There were no seven hierarchies
Speaker 1: when use net first started. In fact, in the beginning,
Speaker 1: there were only three hierarchies of newsgroups, and all that
Speaker 1: was posted should fall under one of the three, and
Speaker 1: it was adequate. So the three hierarchies were net, FA, FA,
Speaker 1: and mod mod, So all newsgroups started with one of
Speaker 1: those designations. So you might have one that says like
Speaker 1: net dot discussion that would be a newsgroup. The net
Speaker 1: hierarchy was pretty much the catch all. It started as
Speaker 1: a hierarchy for newsgroups that were focusing on conversations about
Speaker 1: the network itself, but that rapidly expanded to non network topics,
Speaker 1: so you would get people creating like net dot politics
Speaker 1: or net dot jokes. The FA hierarchy was an acronym
Speaker 1: for from arpinnet. It got started after a student at
Speaker 1: the University of California at Berkeley named Mark Horton joined
Speaker 1: usenet in nineteen eighty and started to add material from
Speaker 1: an arpinet mailing list to the network. Access to Arpinet
Speaker 1: was really limited. It was very difficult to get access,
Speaker 1: so what Horton was doing was kind of a service,
Speaker 1: was providing other people the opportunity to read these mailing lists,
Speaker 1: when otherwise they would not have any access to those
Speaker 1: mailing lists. So arpinnet was sort of a predecessor to
Speaker 1: the Internet. It was the network where computer scientists and
Speaker 1: engineers were developing the rules that would allow for Internet communication.
Speaker 1: So some people say, like, it's the grandfather of the
Speaker 1: Internet if you think of it that way. I think
Speaker 1: that's a little oversimplification, but it kind of gets the
Speaker 1: idea across. So Horton's contributions would lead to a new
Speaker 1: hierarchy dedicated to sharing information from Arbennet mailing lists, the
Speaker 1: FA hierarchy, And originally that was a read only hierarchy,
Speaker 1: so stuff that was posted to that newsgroup you could read,
Speaker 1: but you could not contribute to it unless you were
Speaker 1: one of the authorized entities that could post from mailing
Speaker 1: lists to that hierarchy. Then, as for the mod hierarchy,
Speaker 1: that was for newsgroups that needed to be a bit
Speaker 1: more controlled and buttoned up, because it was pretty clear
Speaker 1: that as more students started to use Usenet, the tendency
Speaker 1: to do goofy stuff like contributing off topic posts to
Speaker 1: a thread or intentionally trying to start flame wars on
Speaker 1: use net. That's really where that got started. These things would,
Speaker 1: you know, derail conversations or sometimes completely pull focus from
Speaker 1: whatever the topic at discussion was supposed to be. So
Speaker 1: the mod hierarchy was moderated. That's what MOD stood for.
Speaker 1: It was a moderated hierarchy. Every post under the mod
Speaker 1: hierarchy would have to be approved by a moderator before
Speaker 1: it was posted to. A newsgroup is often used for
Speaker 1: stuff like official news and official announcements, that kind of
Speaker 1: stuff where you didn't want the Hoi poloi to start
Speaker 1: mucking everything up and confusing the message. So those were
Speaker 1: your three You had your NET, your FA, and your
Speaker 1: MOD and things would carry along that way until we
Speaker 1: would get to the mid eighties. I'll explain more, but
Speaker 1: first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors.
Speaker 1: So we're up to the mid eighties. So remember us
Speaker 1: NET kind of got start in seventy nine, really got
Speaker 1: going in nineteen eighty. We get up to around nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six and into nineteen eighty seven, and a few
Speaker 1: things happened that would shake things up for us NET
Speaker 1: in a really significant way. For one, graduate students Phil
Speaker 1: Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley and Brian Cantor
Speaker 1: of University of California, San Diego wrote a Request for
Speaker 1: Comments or RFC in nineteen eighty six in which they
Speaker 1: described the specification for a new set of rules called
Speaker 1: the Network News Transfer Protocol or in INTP. SO from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty six, the primary way
Speaker 1: that you know, people were accessing use net was through
Speaker 1: these time shared mini computer systems, So you didn't really
Speaker 1: have access unless you had booked that time with the
Speaker 1: mini computer, and as I said, that had really limited things.
Speaker 1: NNTP made it more possible to access us net using
Speaker 1: a microcomputer a personal computer, because by the mid eighties
Speaker 1: these were now a thing that were capable enough to
Speaker 1: be able to do something like that. So you would
Speaker 1: be able to access read and post to use neet
Speaker 1: groups by connectting your mini computer to whatever use net
Speaker 1: server you happened to be able to access. So NNTP
Speaker 1: is what made that all possible, and that would greatly
Speaker 1: extend the access for use net, which meant also that
Speaker 1: volume the posts on us net would increase dramatically as
Speaker 1: a result. This then led to the Great Renaming, and
Speaker 1: yes that's what it's referenced as the Great Renaming. It
Speaker 1: gets a bit dramatic, but as I mentioned earlier, Steve Bellevan,
Speaker 1: the guy who created the first use net client, imagine
Speaker 1: that us net would see maybe one to two new
Speaker 1: articles posted there per day, but us net was generating
Speaker 1: way more than that by the mid nineteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: the creation of n NTP would complicate matters because access
Speaker 1: to us net would grow substantially, and so it was
Speaker 1: becoming a bit of a mess, right, You just had
Speaker 1: these three hierarchies that were trying to handle everything, and
Speaker 1: the really the only differenterentiation between the hierarchies was that
Speaker 1: the net hierarchy was essentially the one where anyone could
Speaker 1: post content. The FA or FAW hierarchy was the one
Speaker 1: that was just for posting content from mailing lists, and
Speaker 1: the mod was for moderated posts, and that was it.
Speaker 1: Everything had to fall into those, but it made it
Speaker 1: really hard to organize and find stuff, like if you
Speaker 1: were searching for something specific, it was hard to find. Now,
Speaker 1: the use net network is decentralized, as I mentioned, but
Speaker 1: Stephen Bellivan explained in those incredible posts that I talked
Speaker 1: about on circleid dot com. They're well worth checking out.
Speaker 1: Some of the nodes in this network held more sway
Speaker 1: than others. They saw more traffic, and so the administrators
Speaker 1: for those use net servers had a bit more power
Speaker 1: than someone who's running a server that gets very little
Speaker 1: traffic at all. And those nodes, along with some of
Speaker 1: the folks who actually were responsible for building use net,
Speaker 1: initially they became known as the backbone cabal. This became
Speaker 1: like a long standing joke in usenet circles about whether
Speaker 1: or not this cabal existed or didn't. But really, what
Speaker 1: it just meant was that collectively they had the power
Speaker 1: to decide what would or would not get wide distribution
Speaker 1: across all of use Net. So let's say that there's
Speaker 1: some sort of extraordinary circumstance that comes up and these
Speaker 1: administrators collectively decide that those newsgroups are bad news, like
Speaker 1: it's just it's dangerous or harmful or whatever you may think.
Speaker 1: And it would have to be extraordinary for this to happen,
Speaker 1: but it could happen. So collectively they decide that they're
Speaker 1: not going to propagate that newsgroup. Well, that would limit
Speaker 1: the circulation of that newsgroup. It wouldn't prevent it from existing.
Speaker 1: It would still exist on whatever home server it was
Speaker 1: posted to. It just wouldn't propagate to other use Net servers,
Speaker 1: or at least not the big ones, which means means
Speaker 1: it would limit the number of people who actually saw
Speaker 1: and could interact with that post. So effectively, it could
Speaker 1: be kind of like censoring that newsgroup. But again, this
Speaker 1: didn't happen that frequently. It's just it was possible because
Speaker 1: of the way usenet works. So this cabal debated and
Speaker 1: discussed creating a new group of hierarchies that thet newsgroups
Speaker 1: could inhabit to make things a little more manageable. This
Speaker 1: in itself became a very long and detailed debate because
Speaker 1: there are so many different ways you can classify information.
Speaker 1: If you don't believe me, ask a librarian, Ask a
Speaker 1: librarian about things like taxonomies and finding out like how
Speaker 1: do you determine where does a book belong in? What
Speaker 1: category should you put any one book? It gets really
Speaker 1: complicated and subjective, So, for example, how would you classify
Speaker 1: video games? Should you put it in like recreation or hobbies?
Speaker 1: Or does it belong in technology or in business or
Speaker 1: in programming. It kind of depends upon the point of view,
Speaker 1: So some decisions would appear mostly arbitrary because when you
Speaker 1: get down to it, they kind of were. So the
Speaker 1: new big seven hierarchies that were created in this great
Speaker 1: renaming were COMP for computer news, which is self explanatory,
Speaker 1: REC for recreation, CIG for science sci, SoC for social sec,
Speaker 1: TALK for general discussion, and MISK for miscellaneous. These were
Speaker 1: not the only hierarchies, but these were the big ones,
Speaker 1: the ones that had the most newsgroups under them. Then
Speaker 1: you had alt which became the alternative hierarchy for newsgroups
Speaker 1: that didn't really fit into the other ones, or that
Speaker 1: were not being accepted into the other hierarchies. At least initially,
Speaker 1: it was possible for a newsgroup to migrate to a
Speaker 1: different hierarchy over enough time, but yeah, it was it
Speaker 1: would make the organization a little wonky. So it again
Speaker 1: extraordinary circumstances. The Big Seven in the nineties would depending
Speaker 1: on whom you ask, would become the Big Eight because
Speaker 1: there was a hierarchy called Humanities that joined the party
Speaker 1: that some people would say kind of belongs with the
Speaker 1: Big Seven. But honestly, there are hundreds of hierarchies. Some
Speaker 1: of them are also pretty big, like biz biz. That's
Speaker 1: a hierarchy dedicated to business newsgroups. It's a pretty happening
Speaker 1: newsgroup or hierarchy, i should say. So there are lots
Speaker 1: of them out there. Some of them just get very
Speaker 1: specific to things like education, that kind of stuff. And
Speaker 1: so numerous use net groups formed. Some of them flourished,
Speaker 1: some of them failed. Some would become the backbone to
Speaker 1: future web content. IMDb dot Com famously started off as
Speaker 1: a use neet group before it became the Internet Movie database,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure no one thought that it was going
Speaker 1: to grow into something that would later get scooped up
Speaker 1: by Amazon when it was still part of a use
Speaker 1: net group. And usnet is still going on strong today.
Speaker 1: There are news groups that are dead, but that's because
Speaker 1: they were focusing on topics that are themselves obsolete. Today
Speaker 1: it would be very strange to find a lively discussion
Speaker 1: about like five and a quarter inch disk drives. Who
Speaker 1: the heck is using them? Besides like very niche hobbyists,
Speaker 1: use net is very different other types of Internet activity
Speaker 1: as well. Use net does not track user behaviors, So
Speaker 1: that's one major difference between using us net versus the web.
Speaker 1: When you're on the web, everyone wants to track you, right,
Speaker 1: There's so many different ways to track user behaviors and
Speaker 1: user web history, and that information becomes valuable. That is
Speaker 1: the currency of the Internet. That's what's being bought and
Speaker 1: sold by data brokers. That's the stuff that is valuable
Speaker 1: about you. You don't get to realize that value. You
Speaker 1: are the product you are being bought and sold. And
Speaker 1: that's just the way it is when you're using the web.
Speaker 1: Use net though it doesn't track user behavior, so you
Speaker 1: can subscribe to whichever use net groups you want. The
Speaker 1: use net server isn't paying attention to who is doing what,
Speaker 1: and so there's a lot more privacy in that regard
Speaker 1: as to you know what you are actually consuming on
Speaker 1: use net versus on the web. There are lots of
Speaker 1: use net clients out there. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: newsreaders out there that you can use. Some of them
Speaker 1: are built into web browsers. There are also a lot
Speaker 1: of use net service providers out there, some of which
Speaker 1: have subscriptions that you have to pay in order to
Speaker 1: access them, but it means that you can access that
Speaker 1: particular provider and get advantages that you would over say
Speaker 1: a smaller provider, like a really big provider will have
Speaker 1: features that you won't find with smaller providers. One of
Speaker 1: the things that net servers have is a retention policy.
Speaker 1: That's how long they will hold a file before deleting it.
Speaker 1: So you know, if you find one that has a
Speaker 1: retention policy of a thousand days or more, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1: I think I saw one that had more than five
Speaker 1: thousand days retention policy, and that means you'll have access
Speaker 1: to the most files that you can, because ultimately, as
Speaker 1: time passes, they will get deleted off use net. So
Speaker 1: depending on which provider you're using to connect to use net,
Speaker 1: you will have access to certain user generated content. If
Speaker 1: you're on a different provider, they might delete files more frequently,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get access to them. There's also
Speaker 1: like limitations to things like how much you can pull
Speaker 1: down per month for some providers. Some of them offer
Speaker 1: unlimited plans that kind of thing. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of variety when it comes to the actual providers out there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's kind of the lowdown on us net.
Speaker 1: What's interesting to me is that, again I have read
Speaker 1: things that suggested that millennials and Gen Z users are
Speaker 1: kind of migrating over to us net more and more,
Speaker 1: which is news to me. I think that's really interesting,
Speaker 1: and especially since like I associate use net with an
Speaker 1: old method of accessing the Internet. And for the record,
Speaker 1: I had access to use net a little bit in
Speaker 1: my youth and my college years and everything, but truth
Speaker 1: be told, I kind of went from BBS's bulletin board systems,
Speaker 1: which are you know, that's where you're logging into a
Speaker 1: local computer or a single computer not a network, and
Speaker 1: you're getting you're posting and retrieving information to that compute,
Speaker 1: and you're not networked into a larger system. I went
Speaker 1: from that to telnet, and from tel net I went
Speaker 1: to the World Wide Web. So I didn't use us
Speaker 1: net that much when I was in college, which was
Speaker 1: in the early nineties, so this was mostly me learning
Speaker 1: about it because I had only had limited access to usnet.
Speaker 1: I did hear about it quite a bit, like you
Speaker 1: would always hear about the various alt news groups that
Speaker 1: were catering to some rather varied interests. I will say,
Speaker 1: but I never frequented them because I was more too
Speaker 1: busy tell netting into chat rooms and chatting with people
Speaker 1: in other colleges just for the heck of it. So
Speaker 1: that's it. That's our little overview of what us net is.
Speaker 1: I almost said was, but it really is still a thing.
Speaker 1: I hope you are all well, and I will talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
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