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Can anyone give me any information on USENET?

mrichmon said:
Come now. The real posts where shar archives. :)
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That's still useful! Some ancient patches and updates found their way into the Google archive intact thanks to shar, so it's possible to reconstruct some historical software versions that are "lost" (or buried too deep in closets for anyone to be bothered to dig them out).
 
SummerBreeze said:
It all seems so difficult, and all of a sudden I feel really young since I've never really experienced the world of USENET. Thanks for the clarifications on what it is, I used to see the word all the time and I didn't really know what it meant.
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We may be making it all sound worse than it is :) It's really no more complicated to use than email!
 
I've been using the Internet since 1995 first on a dedicated T1 line and now on residential DSL, and I've never visited USENET. It's even still a little bit of a mystery to me.

Whatever it was used for, I think everything we do now can be accomplished through the web, email and IM.


Here's to the Crazy Ones ​
 
Lacero said:
I've been using the Internet since 1995 first on a dedicated T1 line and now on residential DSL, and I've never visited USENET. It's even still a little bit of a mystery to me.

Whatever it was used for, I think everything we do now can be accomplished through the web, email and IM.


Here's to the Crazy Ones ​
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Usenet was basically whole lot of bulletin boards like this one used to exchange information and files about a specific topic before the advent of the web and gui's. It is more comparable to the macrumors forums that e-mail or chat. Usenet is still very popular in the Warez community and p0rn. There are still regular boards you can take a look at as well.

You can view usenet from google groups. In the olden days it was just text menus and you scrolled through it. after that you select the message and responded to it, or you download the uuencoded file that was attached usually in multiple parts and ran your script to decode it.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.programmer.games?lnk=lr
 
I have been extremely happy with GigaNews as my Usenet provider (even though I get it for free with my Earthlink subscription, GigaNews is vastly superior). I also use Unison to read and post, a native OS X shareware application.
 
The Mac programming groups (especially, comp.sys.mac.programmer.help) can be superb.

I frequent a few sport (F1 and rugby) groups as well, but they can be quite cliquish.
 
It's funny there's a topic about this, I've not used USENET in a million years and I'm currently fighting the tech support desks at the uni over a problem they insist isn't happening. <sigh> Freaking usenet.
 
I stumbled upon Unison after several days of looking for a decent binary reader/downloader. Out of all the apps I've tried Unison is by far the best in my opinion for the mac platform (I use Newsbin on Windows). Unison does occasionally lock up on me and I can't always kill it without rebooting but it doesn't happen often so I can tolerate it.
 
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