Okay, so someone asked me about Usenet the other day – and I waxed nostalgic on what it used to be. In my mind, that’s still what it is. CJ (AKA Bahumatneo) was a little disappointed in me…

I am an avid watcher of your id’s on YouTube and I was kinda disappointed in the video about usenet. Not about anything you said, it was very informative, but about the fact that you left any information about what it has become out.

I will admit that download certain material from time to time, the time being every few seconds but the phrase still applys. I started on Limewire where I was constently annoyed at the speeds, the cutoff times, and though many files just seemed only to exist in name only. Why show the link if the file is unavailable??????. I later heard about torrents and became an avid user of them. I still love torrents, although the speed is kinda annoying, for the fact that they always work, and you can find almost anything using them.

When I heard about newsgroups, I looked into it immediately. It turned out that while I was only downloading at 22-200kb\s with torrents, I was downloading at over 1mb\s with newsgroups. My jaw dropped. The binaries found on newsgroups have been the main way I get my files of any data type since then, and with the addition of quickpar, I have never been happier. I consistently download at the fastest speed that my internet connection will allow.

Sorry about the rant7, keep up the great videos, they are extremely entertaining and informative.

Even back then, I remember running the uuencode and uudecode utilities from my University VMS and Unix accounts. :) I could never handle MIME encoding easily, and now I guess everyone relies on Yenc over all others? Regardless, Usenet was better policed by the community back then – and most of the files to be found were legal, photos, and/or unregistered shareware. At least, in the newsgroups I frequented!

• What is UseNet?