Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: Tex Style from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poett.
Speaker 1: I am an editor here at how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com and as usual, sitting across from me, I have
Speaker 1: senior writer Jonathan Strickland, and I'm more than meets the eye. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Chris and I just moments ago, uh we're sitting
Speaker 1: here in front of the microphones talking about Internet relay chat.
Speaker 1: So that podcast may or may not have have published
Speaker 1: by the time you hear this, but during that we said,
Speaker 1: you know, we should really talk about another really important
Speaker 1: part of the Internet that predates the World Wide Web,
Speaker 1: but it's still around and uh, it's still playing a role.
Speaker 1: It's maybe not nearly as as a big role as
Speaker 1: it used to, but it's something that that we felt
Speaker 1: needs to be addressed in an episode. Do you want
Speaker 1: to tell them what it is? Yes? Oh? Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: use net, use net. Yeah. As as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: one of the things that we mentioned in the other podcast,
Speaker 1: um and and several of the podcasts we've had in
Speaker 1: the past, is that not all the traffic on the
Speaker 1: Internet goes from place to place using the same method. Um.
Speaker 1: You have emailing, you have the web, UM, you have
Speaker 1: file transfer protocol, UM. But in UH, in the case
Speaker 1: of using net, it has its own protocol to deliver
Speaker 1: UH news files, or at least that's what it was
Speaker 1: used for initially. Yeah, it's kind of UM. It's funny
Speaker 1: because the terms that we're used to kind of define
Speaker 1: what use net was early on stuck around, even when
Speaker 1: you might argue that it's more like a message board,
Speaker 1: like an old If you go to a website that
Speaker 1: has a message board, a lot of the message board
Speaker 1: stuff that you'll see on their kind of owes a
Speaker 1: lot to the early use net days. And UH it
Speaker 1: relies on a Unix to Unix copy protocol that was
Speaker 1: the original writ call for use net. So you use
Speaker 1: CP is what we abbreviate that as, or acronymicize. I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna I'm acronemonious. UM. Yeah, that actually that actually
Speaker 1: changed m Yeah, because I mean if it had just
Speaker 1: stayed Unix to Unix, then that would have really limited
Speaker 1: the usefulness of use net. It would have been useless net. Well,
Speaker 1: relatively useless net. Well, and you can actually you can
Speaker 1: actually use the web for uh for a lot of
Speaker 1: this now, so I mean you can. There are some
Speaker 1: uses of using net that you really don't even need
Speaker 1: a specific client, although you can still get them. But later,
Speaker 1: a later class um sorry, later protocol that they developed
Speaker 1: to provide use net services is n NTP or Network
Speaker 1: News Transfer Protocol, right um, and that that became the
Speaker 1: way of deliver bring messages UH for US net groups. Now, uh,
Speaker 1: these are in a way it's kind of hard to
Speaker 1: describe a US net group to someone who's never seen one.
Speaker 1: But if you think about, um, maybe a discussion board
Speaker 1: on one of your favorite websites, it's sort of like that. Um,
Speaker 1: the the there is a board where there is a topic, um, say,
Speaker 1: you know, fans of Beverly Hills nine o two one oh,
Speaker 1: for example, and people can post messages pro or con
Speaker 1: there just about anything for which there is a fan.
Speaker 1: On one of these use net groups, you will find
Speaker 1: people who are trolling. They're posting how much they cannot
Speaker 1: stand whatever it is that other people are a fan of, right,
Speaker 1: and that this other thing that is probably not related
Speaker 1: to the first thing at all. Is obviously better. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: So for example, I might jump into the Star Trek
Speaker 1: uh fan discussion and talk about how Star Wars is
Speaker 1: so much better than Star Trek and may not even
Speaker 1: be that. I believe that, it's just that I decided
Speaker 1: I wanted to stir up some trouble. So yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: us that's we can get into where where how how
Speaker 1: much usen has contributed to the culture of the Internet.
Speaker 1: Trolls are one of the things that first started really
Speaker 1: popping up right around the days of eusenet. Let's let's
Speaker 1: kind of go back a bit. Let's talk about the
Speaker 1: development of eusnet. Okay, so I'm assuming you're getting ready
Speaker 1: to mention Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis and as I
Speaker 1: do it first, Oh yes, those guys, Um, yeah, so
Speaker 1: they kind of came up with this idea. This was ah,
Speaker 1: these were two graduate students with Duke University at the
Speaker 1: time and the time being nineteen seventy nine, and uh,
Speaker 1: they were thinking that they needed to update an older,
Speaker 1: uh model of of accessing information through the computer system. UM,
Speaker 1: that would be the old BBS model or Bolton board
Speaker 1: system now Bolton board systems. I actually used these when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. I mean I would log into them.
Speaker 1: But a bolton Board system is much more limited than
Speaker 1: you snet bolton Board system is. You would you would
Speaker 1: not I remember dialing into them. You would use your
Speaker 1: modem to dial in a specific phone number. You would
Speaker 1: log into the bolton Board system, which is hosted on
Speaker 1: a remote computer, and there you could uh interact with
Speaker 1: other users by by posting to a discussion board. Um,
Speaker 1: you could play games, you could transfer files, you could
Speaker 1: upload stuff or download stuff, a lot of things that
Speaker 1: you can do on the web now. But it was
Speaker 1: very limited in that it was only stuff that was
Speaker 1: on that one computer. It's not like you had access
Speaker 1: to everything on every bolton Board system. So every bolton
Speaker 1: Board system had its own culture, its own selection of files,
Speaker 1: its own message boards. Also, it had a very limited
Speaker 1: number of people that could be logged in at one time. Uh.
Speaker 1: Normally it had like a series of lines open, like
Speaker 1: phone lines open that could be occupied before it reached capacity.
Speaker 1: And if you called when it was at capacity, you
Speaker 1: couldn't get in. You'd have to wait, And which seems
Speaker 1: weird now. Just imagine if you were to open up
Speaker 1: your your web browser and you were told sorry, the
Speaker 1: Internet is full. You're gonna have to wait until some
Speaker 1: people log off before you can access it. But uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just it wasn't like a network really. It
Speaker 1: was you were all using one computer as almost like
Speaker 1: a node, right, yes, and you you had a you know,
Speaker 1: it was acting as a server. Your computer was acting
Speaker 1: as a client. But there was no network. It was
Speaker 1: just client server. That's it. Like a hub and spoke
Speaker 1: right exactly, exactly. Yeah, the the host computer is is
Speaker 1: right there at the very center, and then you're you
Speaker 1: and all the other computers are on the edge connecting in.
Speaker 1: So you would post messages to the hub and then
Speaker 1: other people could read them and reply to them. And
Speaker 1: all the information was there at that one central location exactly.
Speaker 1: And if that one central location went down, then everything
Speaker 1: was gone, ye until it came back up again. Usnet
Speaker 1: is different. Usenet is more of a network system, and so,
Speaker 1: uh Trustcott and Ellis had come up with this idea
Speaker 1: of creating a system that would exist across multiple servers.
Speaker 1: It would all be based on the same protocol and
Speaker 1: you would build a essentially a message board, a news
Speaker 1: group that where you could post articles about whatever subjects
Speaker 1: you wanted and have discussions about those subjects, and UH
Speaker 1: servers would contact one another and compare essentially their their
Speaker 1: message boards, and anything that one server was missing, the
Speaker 1: other server would send to it so it could update
Speaker 1: its own its own database, and vice versa, so that
Speaker 1: no matter what happened to any one single server machine,
Speaker 1: you would still be able to access that information because
Speaker 1: it would exist somewhere on the network, assuming that they
Speaker 1: had synchronized somewhat recently. So UH it also meant that
Speaker 1: you didn't have all these isolated conversations going on across
Speaker 1: multiple bulletin board systems. That's what was happening before. Like
Speaker 1: you might have a very strong fan community in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles for Star Trek, Well let's just stick with Star Trek,
Speaker 1: and then you have another really strong fan community and
Speaker 1: say in New York City also about Star Trek. But
Speaker 1: they wouldn't necessarily be logging into the same bulletin board system,
Speaker 1: especially if they were using dial up modems, because they
Speaker 1: don't want to pay long distance to have to connect
Speaker 1: to it, So their conversations would all be regional. USENET
Speaker 1: allowed a global conversation to occur because you're no longer
Speaker 1: worrying about logging into one specific local computer. So it
Speaker 1: was a revolutionary idea. We take it for granted now
Speaker 1: because the Worldwide Web has been around for a couple
Speaker 1: of decades, but at the time it was, there was
Speaker 1: this idea of, hey, we've already got the lines here
Speaker 1: connecting all these computers, and we've got the protocols that
Speaker 1: support this kind of data transfer, the whole T c
Speaker 1: P I P protocols. Let's build something on top of
Speaker 1: this infrastructure that allows us to share information. So the
Speaker 1: same sort of idea that eventually became the World Wide Web,
Speaker 1: but in a totally different implementation. Okay, then, so there
Speaker 1: are literally tens of thousands of using net newsgroups available
Speaker 1: and they're still you know, that's it's still in in
Speaker 1: pretty wide use. UM. You know that recently, I've i've
Speaker 1: my most recent exploits on usinget UM. I've found several
Speaker 1: UH communities that are are basically just spam magnets UM,
Speaker 1: but there are still quite a few that are that
Speaker 1: are very very popular UM. And using that actually has
Speaker 1: a hierarchy to it. Yeah, that hierarchy wasn't always part
Speaker 1: of usenet's history. In fact, the problem was that as
Speaker 1: more and more information was being added to usenet, it
Speaker 1: became difficult to navigate through all of it to see
Speaker 1: the stuff that's relevant to your own interests, and so
Speaker 1: they needed to come up with a scheme that would
Speaker 1: allow people to post relevant things in discussions and make
Speaker 1: it easier to find what you're interested in, so it
Speaker 1: wouldn't become an exercise and frustration. Part of that fell
Speaker 1: to a group of people that became known as the
Speaker 1: Backbone Cabal. That's really what they were known as, and
Speaker 1: and that yeah, well, and some people argued that it
Speaker 1: was sneaky and that the choices they made were not
Speaker 1: representative of the community as a whole, something that we
Speaker 1: see like in the background of wikis all the time. Now,
Speaker 1: the same sort of problems happened with wikis. Whenever you
Speaker 1: have a big, wide, open UH community, than any one
Speaker 1: group making decisions is going to upset someone in that
Speaker 1: community because it doesn't represent them. Right, So the cabal decided,
Speaker 1: all right, well, we need to try and UH and
Speaker 1: start um to organize this in a more efficient way.
Speaker 1: And that leads up to, in nineteen seven, an event
Speaker 1: called the Great Renaming Gasp. Yeah, so and the great renaming.
Speaker 1: That was when things had come to a head on usenet.
Speaker 1: It was getting far too chaotic and they needed to
Speaker 1: find a way of creating a hierarchy that made sense.
Speaker 1: And that's when they started making the the what was
Speaker 1: initially called the Big Seven. Yes, it's the Big seven
Speaker 1: hierarchical hierarchical groups. So you had things like COMP c
Speaker 1: O MP for for any sort of computer discussion, comp
Speaker 1: dot and then you could put something behind the dot
Speaker 1: to specify, so you could do like comp dot hardware
Speaker 1: and then if you want to get more specific, you
Speaker 1: do COMP dot hardware, DOT monitor. So you would be
Speaker 1: able to you know, break these down into subcategories so
Speaker 1: that people could have very specific conversations and not have
Speaker 1: to worry about, you know, cluttering up one comp thing
Speaker 1: with every single computer topic no demand. And there were
Speaker 1: other categories as well. There was you know s c
Speaker 1: I for science UM. There was originally there was talk,
Speaker 1: which was supposed to be kind of a catch all category,
Speaker 1: but it was also monitored. This did not sit well
Speaker 1: with some users because it meant that you couldn't have
Speaker 1: true free communication, free speech because someone somewhere was monitoring
Speaker 1: what was going on and could except or deny any
Speaker 1: particular topic. Uh, which then led to what has become
Speaker 1: probably the most famous or perhaps infamous hierarchy in usenet
Speaker 1: alt ALT, which was not part of the Cabal. In fact,
Speaker 1: that was a big, big selling point for the whole
Speaker 1: alt things. What made it so popular so quickly. It's
Speaker 1: kind of anything and everything really yeah, alt dot whatever.
Speaker 1: It's Brian Reid is the guy who kind of spearheaded
Speaker 1: that project to to create and he was one of
Speaker 1: the people who objected to this idea of the cabal
Speaker 1: backed high archies, saying that you know, if we if
Speaker 1: we do this, it limits us too much. We need
Speaker 1: it to be more open than that. And uh, this
Speaker 1: was a place where frank discussions could be held on
Speaker 1: any topic. Like reeds point was that he wanted to
Speaker 1: open up a a topic under wreck r e C
Speaker 1: which is for recreation uh dot drugs. He wanted to
Speaker 1: create a topic for that to have discussion about drugs
Speaker 1: drug use and was denied. Um. He was not allowed
Speaker 1: to create a talk dot drugs group either, So he
Speaker 1: decided to create this alt hierarchy, so so you know,
Speaker 1: just circumventing the whole system and creating a new uh,
Speaker 1: a new division that has nothing to do with the
Speaker 1: Big seven. Um. And it took off. In fact, it
Speaker 1: took off so much that it is the largest of
Speaker 1: the categories, which is kind of ironic because all of
Speaker 1: course stands for alternative, right, but now every ing else
Speaker 1: is the alternative because it's the main thing. Kind of
Speaker 1: like alternative music was in the mid nineties or exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: the alternative music was the only thing out there. There
Speaker 1: was no alternative. Yeah, and using grungy And that's the
Speaker 1: thing is if you dirty hippie type seattle the thing,
Speaker 1: go ahead, are you done? I was a punk rocker.
Speaker 1: You and China anyway, so umtally was so welcome. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's a good point. You can't just say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I wanna start a discussion topic about
Speaker 1: my band and just go start a group. Uh, not instantaneously.
Speaker 1: You can put it up for a suggestion and uh
Speaker 1: and you know, once people have had a chance to
Speaker 1: look at it and say, oh, well, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that would be a kay or I don't think
Speaker 1: that would be okay. You know, it can become a group. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's it's not like starting a a an Internet
Speaker 1: relay chat channel where you go, you know what, I
Speaker 1: want to talk about this right now, and just go
Speaker 1: start a channel. You have to actually have it approved
Speaker 1: um by by the powers that be, which really are
Speaker 1: kind of decentralized anyway. It's kind of weird. Frankly, again,
Speaker 1: I think the the comparison to wikis is fairly apt
Speaker 1: because wikies are often maintained by a community of users
Speaker 1: and UH, and they often resist any attempts at any
Speaker 1: single user trying to dictate policy. We we saw that
Speaker 1: not that long ago actually with Wikipedia, where the co
Speaker 1: founder Jimmy Wales went to try and delete material from
Speaker 1: the Wikimedia Commons collection UM in in hoping to head
Speaker 1: off any problems with with sponsors for Wikimedia. UH. And
Speaker 1: as a result because of his because he didn't go
Speaker 1: through the proper procedures and he bypassed the whole community aspect, UH,
Speaker 1: there was a big kerfuffle over at at Wikipedia. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the same sort of thing happened on usenet all
Speaker 1: the time and still does probably in some of these
Speaker 1: uh and some of these news groups. It's not like
Speaker 1: it's it's not really a democracy, UM. And the people
Speaker 1: in charge aren't really completely in charge. It's you know,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a little strain, it's a little wild
Speaker 1: West out there. But you know, I think I think
Speaker 1: the people who are are really getting the the or
Speaker 1: nay votes are too people who have been established and
Speaker 1: really entrenched in the usneture. Well, we we've mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that trolls were one of the uh you know, they
Speaker 1: kind of emerged from usenet, and one of the most
Speaker 1: common trolli ish tactics on usenet was to log into
Speaker 1: any particular discussion forum and then start talking about something
Speaker 1: that was completely off topic. And you're doing it on purpose.
Speaker 1: You're doing it specifically to upset people. Or you would
Speaker 1: log into a discussion group about a particular topic and
Speaker 1: then start asking inane questions, or start asking legitimate questions
Speaker 1: and then slowly have them morph into more and more
Speaker 1: inane questions, just to see how far you could push people,
Speaker 1: how long you could get people to respond to you
Speaker 1: before they caught onto that it was all a joke
Speaker 1: and uh, trolls really the whole purpose was just too
Speaker 1: In most cases anyway, um, the purpose was just for
Speaker 1: their own amusement to try and wind people up, see
Speaker 1: how upset they could get them, or just see if
Speaker 1: they could play a joke. Not all of them were malicious.
Speaker 1: Some of them were really just pranks, you know, They're
Speaker 1: more mischievous than malicious. And then there were others where
Speaker 1: you would get people who were fans of one particular
Speaker 1: UH discussion group and they would get real rivalries with
Speaker 1: other discussion groups and would actually go in and spam.
Speaker 1: That's another thing that came out of use spam. The
Speaker 1: earliest the instances and naming of spam came from that
Speaker 1: and people just coming in and posting ridiculous stuff. Because
Speaker 1: that's another you know, if you post enough to use net,
Speaker 1: you start to UM, you start to scroll content off
Speaker 1: of use net. Yes, because it only had a limited
Speaker 1: amount of space to store UM data. And if you
Speaker 1: went in and posted enough stuff, you could push data
Speaker 1: off of use net and then people wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to access it anymore. Yes. UM. And since people were
Speaker 1: using us neet to do things like not just have conversations,
Speaker 1: but to host files UM where you could you know,
Speaker 1: especially things like uh uh material that's under copyright UM.
Speaker 1: There's tons of piracy that you can find on use
Speaker 1: net of various kinds of materials yea. And that was
Speaker 1: one of the things that that struck me as odd
Speaker 1: because UM, I used most of my use net use
Speaker 1: was way back in the early to mid nineties UM.
Speaker 1: And then a few years ago I heard people starting
Speaker 1: to talk about using Actually one of my favorite software
Speaker 1: of shareware developers came out with a brand new use
Speaker 1: that client, and I was thinking, really, people are still
Speaker 1: using that, And then I realized the correlation between that
Speaker 1: and my Internet service provider putting a cap on the
Speaker 1: amount of data that you could receive over use net
Speaker 1: because I was thinking, since when did use that traffic
Speaker 1: becomes so uh, you know, such an issue. And then
Speaker 1: then I realized that I learned about the binaries groups
Speaker 1: because you can break down a file into multiple pieces
Speaker 1: and spread it out over multiple messages, and and the
Speaker 1: messages are threaded. I neglected to mention earlier because that's
Speaker 1: how you sort of follow the topic, is that they're
Speaker 1: responding to posts and you can you can thread them
Speaker 1: together and see, you know, where the conversation has gone.
Speaker 1: We can also do that with binary files, and that's
Speaker 1: how you know, rather than using something such as bit
Speaker 1: torrent for example, people were shared ing uh, cracked files
Speaker 1: or binaries of of other media that you know, people
Speaker 1: were going on us it's and I think it's sort
Speaker 1: of escaped attention simply because using net was old in
Speaker 1: terms of the Internet. Yeah, you could. You could find
Speaker 1: stuff software, images, music, that kind of thing, provided of course,
Speaker 1: your i SP isn't blocking those groups, which it it
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily your your i SP doesn't have to carry
Speaker 1: access to to use that they could block it. And
Speaker 1: if they are blocking access to those groups, you may
Speaker 1: not see them, you know, right in and go my
Speaker 1: SP doesn't have those Well, maybe your IP is blocking
Speaker 1: and they're they're i s p s that would just
Speaker 1: put anything that falls under alt binary as you know,
Speaker 1: they block it automatically, um, which you know, that's that
Speaker 1: could be frustrating because there usenet was a way of
Speaker 1: being able to share legitimate open source software. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't just stuff that was pirate ID or you know
Speaker 1: that that was being illegally shared. There was there were
Speaker 1: legitimate uses to to uh to log in to all
Speaker 1: binaries that had nothing to do with piracy stealing intellectual property.
Speaker 1: But you know, it gets really really hard to separate
Speaker 1: all of that out. And uh so most companies, most
Speaker 1: I s p s, if they're going to block it,
Speaker 1: would just rather paint with a broad brush than than
Speaker 1: to try and have to determine, okay, well is this
Speaker 1: is this group all right? And is this group not
Speaker 1: all right? And why? And that's just one part of
Speaker 1: I mean, the piracy was one part. Pornography is another big,
Speaker 1: big thing on housnet, or at least it used to be. UM.
Speaker 1: So there are some come I s p s that
Speaker 1: would just block all the the groups that had anything
Speaker 1: to do with pornographic content. Um. And I remember when
Speaker 1: I in the nineties, when I would log into usenet
Speaker 1: and look at the different groups, I was kind of
Speaker 1: shocked at how many were dedicated to that in various forms,
Speaker 1: especially when you're like, you know, obviously my education doesn't
Speaker 1: extend as far as these people would, as I would
Speaker 1: have sworn that three of these groups are saying the
Speaker 1: same thing, but they're all arguing that it's something unique,
Speaker 1: and I'm scared to see what they mean. You know,
Speaker 1: it reminds me of a song. Um yeah, so maybe
Speaker 1: we should just drop that part of this. So so
Speaker 1: earlier I mentioned um that in general, you would want
Speaker 1: to to get a Usenet reader, a client software client
Speaker 1: to do this and that, and that's generally the way
Speaker 1: you're you're going to go to get you know, more
Speaker 1: recent postings. But there was a website that used to archive, uh,
Speaker 1: postings from usenet and um and yeah, that's as you
Speaker 1: were mentioning earlier, Jonathan also, um, usually the server will
Speaker 1: basically slough off the old messages as the newer ones
Speaker 1: come in to save space. They only say save up
Speaker 1: to a certain point. Um. Well, as people were archiving them,
Speaker 1: there was a website called dejan News that was keeping
Speaker 1: track of all this. And if you were looking for
Speaker 1: something in particular, um, and it was you know, from
Speaker 1: five years ago or something like this, and you know
Speaker 1: you saw this posting in this news group and you
Speaker 1: didn't save a copy, Um, you might go to dejan
Speaker 1: news do this. Well, they were acquired by a larger company, um,
Speaker 1: which you may have heard of. Is it Yahoo? No? No,
Speaker 1: that Facebook, Twitter, It's gotta be Google. Yes, yes, it
Speaker 1: became Google Groups and uh. They Google has has managed
Speaker 1: to to keep um dejan news archives up and running
Speaker 1: under the Google Group's banner, and there is quite a
Speaker 1: lot of Internet history chronicled in the pages of Google groups. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've got a really really fun little uh timeline too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where they can tell you little things like uh, like
Speaker 1: in auguste on usenet, there's the first documented review of
Speaker 1: the ibm PC. Yes, and uh they have the first
Speaker 1: mentioned of MTV you had June nine two. Uh, Actually
Speaker 1: it's right after that, the first mention of Star Wars
Speaker 1: episode six. Yeah, that would be a return of the Jedi. Actually,
Speaker 1: if it's the first mention, I bet then they called
Speaker 1: it Revenge of the Jedi. They might indeed have. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, there are a lot of really cool little
Speaker 1: first in here, like the February first me to post,
Speaker 1: which would become a vain in people's existences of me too,
Speaker 1: because it doesn't have had anything of benefit to the discussion.
Speaker 1: It's just you wanting to Hey, I've been quiet for
Speaker 1: a while and I need to talk now, me too. Um.
Speaker 1: And then the most most important post in August four,
Speaker 1: the first mention of the Commodore amiga. Oh yeah, of course.
Speaker 1: How also July first mention of Bill Clinton h as well,
Speaker 1: before he would become never mind, I'm not gonna go there,
Speaker 1: No there's there's tons and tons of of information in there.
Speaker 1: Um you could you could basically track you can even
Speaker 1: track the first dot com um Internet company. Back to
Speaker 1: when Brad Templeton mentioned clarinet um yep, I got like
Speaker 1: the first mention of A O L the first mention
Speaker 1: of the Simpsons. I mean, it's it's kind of you know, granted,
Speaker 1: this is just a list that Google's compiled. It's not
Speaker 1: like it's it's comprehensive, but it's just kind of a
Speaker 1: fun little thing of seeing how you know, the development
Speaker 1: of various technologies, cultural icons, that kind of thing. Um Like,
Speaker 1: remember then, yeah, Tim berners Lee introduces the Worldwide Web,
Speaker 1: which that was, you know, whatever happened that it's it's
Speaker 1: it's still around uman. As it turns out, the Worldwide
Speaker 1: Web would would take a big chunk out of usenet
Speaker 1: traffic because a lot of the stuff eventually moved over
Speaker 1: to the web, where you'd be able to find the
Speaker 1: same kind of discussion groups or uh not usually in
Speaker 1: in the same sort of format of usenet. I mean,
Speaker 1: usnet was a catch all, right, it was it was
Speaker 1: an enormous place to have discussions where you could discuss
Speaker 1: practically anything. You can probably find a topic for whatever
Speaker 1: it was you wanted to discuss somewhere on use net
Speaker 1: and you still probably can. You might have to do
Speaker 1: a little picking and choosing on on the different groups,
Speaker 1: and it may not be that there are that many
Speaker 1: people discussing it these days on the on the world
Speaker 1: wide Web. Now, of course you'll find niche websites that
Speaker 1: that might cover a small sliver of what you might
Speaker 1: see on use net um. But but you know, it's
Speaker 1: still there's still some of that hanging around the web.
Speaker 1: Because it actually kind of in a way reminds me
Speaker 1: of what an RSS aggregator does, because rather than going
Speaker 1: to a niche website to have a discussion with people
Speaker 1: about different topics, all kinds of different topics that you
Speaker 1: were interested in, you'd have to go individually to those
Speaker 1: websites you could if people were still using it like
Speaker 1: they used to go to use net. Check your reader
Speaker 1: and see the ten groups that you're really passionate about
Speaker 1: in one play ace and then go through the messages
Speaker 1: for each one, make replies and things like that. Make
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of a predecessor to r S
Speaker 1: S readers. Yeah, I mean it's it just struck me
Speaker 1: how similar those those were, and when you mentioned that
Speaker 1: the niche websites. But it does have that advantage and
Speaker 1: it does have a sort of a community feel to it,
Speaker 1: um where I didn't used to Why you have a
Speaker 1: strange lookin I just saw another thing on on the
Speaker 1: date list that made me smile. Okay with that July
Speaker 1: Terry Pratchett's first post on a dot fan Dot Pratchett. Yes,
Speaker 1: so we're talking about that on the I r C podcast,
Speaker 1: if you know, and if you want to go back
Speaker 1: and listen to that or wait until it publishes, whichever,
Speaker 1: we don't know. That's funny. Were referred in each of
Speaker 1: these to the other one. So one of them is
Speaker 1: going to have an Easter eggain. It's kind of recursive anyhow,
Speaker 1: you'll get caught in a vicious cycle. But it's it
Speaker 1: was it's really formative in the in the way that
Speaker 1: it's sort of transition people from bulletin boards to the
Speaker 1: Internet culture. Yeah, creating the whole the whole platform or
Speaker 1: a global conversation about various topics, which you know, the
Speaker 1: web has kind of taken that torch and and has
Speaker 1: run with it, ran with it, but yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, Usenet is where you see the seeds of that.
Speaker 1: So definitely an important part of the development of the
Speaker 1: Internet and Internet culture, you know, like we were saying
Speaker 1: before with the whole trolls and the spam. Other things
Speaker 1: really got started on Usenet that have become very popular
Speaker 1: on online. Things like emoticons um not necessarily started on Usenet,
Speaker 1: but it became popular there. And and some of the
Speaker 1: various acronyms like b r B for b right back
Speaker 1: and uh a FK for away from keyboard. You would
Speaker 1: even you know, occasionally people would get into discussions where
Speaker 1: it was happening about as close to real time as
Speaker 1: you could manage on Usenet. I mean, it's not like
Speaker 1: it was instantaneous. It wasn't like a chat program, but
Speaker 1: people would still do that where they would post a
Speaker 1: message and we're like, you know what, I'm gonna check
Speaker 1: back in half an hour and see if if if
Speaker 1: Bob has responded to this, because he was just on
Speaker 1: and I've just responded to his message. Neat stuff. Indeed,
Speaker 1: we'll have to talk about some other really important various protocols, programs,
Speaker 1: things like that. That have been part of Internet history
Speaker 1: that we maybe don't think about that often, but are
Speaker 1: still you know, instrumental and where we are now why not? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's kind of what we do. And if you
Speaker 1: guys have anything you would like us to talk about specifically,
Speaker 1: you can email us. Our address is tech stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. And until then, Christina taught
Speaker 1: you again. Really soon for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: And be sure to check out the new tech stuff
Speaker 1: blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to
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Speaker 1: are you