• Garrathian@beehaw.org
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    2 years ago

    I’ve never heard of the term eternal september until now, that’s pretty neat. Makes me wonder what 1980s usenet groups/conversations looked like. I wonder if DOS or other OS’s at the time had a navigable interface for it

    • xumsixle@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 years ago

      One of the main reasons linux has a network stack is so that linus could browse usenet from his desk back when he was still in uni (i remember reading this somewhere ill update this with a source as soon as i find it)

      edit: found the source

    • Digital Mark@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      I was on USENET from '89-2005-ish, on various Unix versions. I used trn until strn came out; it has an amazingly useful threaded display, where you can move around posts on a big branching thread to follow replies. strn added scoring, so a file full of rules would up and downvote things (privately) so I’d only see the good stuff up top, and never see a lot of obvious garbage.

      There were less capable clients for Windows & such, but if you had the choice you used a text-mode Unix client.

      September That Never Ended wasn’t great, AOLers were really terrible, but now the entire Internet is AOL-quality, so I doubt it’ll make much difference.