One of the earliest services set up on the newfangled internet way back when was Usenet. Here's a brief history from Wikipedia:
Usenet (a contraction of user network) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post public messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various web forums which are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
Basically, in the days before all of the purty pictures and such that comprised what would be the WWW, Usenet was how ideas were exchanged. And it was very effective in its time.
The whole structure was pretty rigidly organized, with hierarchies as follow:
* comp.*: computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
* humanities.*: Fine arts, literature, and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)
* misc.*: Miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
* news.*: Discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
* rec.*: Recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
* sci.*: Science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
* soc.*: Social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
* talk.*: Talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)
My all-time favorite group was alt.shenanigans. Back in its day, there were some unbelievable hilarious practical jokes listed there.
I just installed Pan Newsreader on my Ubuntu system and subscribed to alt.shenanigans. Here's what I found:
- One link to a joke website (which wouldn't come up).
- 80 or so canceled messages, apparently spam, since they were also posted to a bunch of sex newsgroups
- A dozen or so spam messages
- Two actual shens that I had viewed earlier, posted three months ago
This was a group that, ten years ago, typically had over a hundred entries for shenanigans, most of which were great.
Apparently, Usenet, the alt section anyway, has been left to purveyors of spam, porn, and warez.
That's a shame.
