Today, May 20th 2010, marks a sad day for all of us who remember – and grew up with – Usenet. Duke University will be forever pulling the plug on the once-popular means of communication, laying it to rest at long last. More than thirty years ago, Usenet was started by two then-students as a means to communicate between computer modems. Many say that it was the beginning of the Internet as we know it today.

Once it began, Usenet quickly grew to become an international electronic discussion forum consisting of more than 120,000 newsgroups. However, not everyone could just jump “online” using the service because connections were expensive and required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science at Duke, said that “Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate communications.”

While the RIAA and MPAA may be celebrating this news due to the large amount of piracy going around Usenet, this is a sad day for the rest of us. Duke has decided to shut the service down due to rising costs of maintenance and lower volumes of people using the service. I well remember my days back on the computer before the Internet as you know it was born. I was so excited back then when I sent my first message from my computer to another. It’s a day that changed my life.

• Facebook has been blocked by the Pakistani government.
• What should you look for when choosing a monitored home security system?
• Flash video is going P2P.
• Best Buy has entered the movie rental market, but are they too late to the game?
• An iPod Touch with camera on board has been leaked.
• Celebrate the 25th anniversary of Steven Levy’s classic book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.
• Should you jump into the Cloud?
• Once again, Linux is ahead of Windows.
• OpenBSD 4.7 has arrived.
• How do you restore an iPhone to factory settings?
• Avoid people who discourage you at all costs.
• What was your largest cell phone bill ever?
• Should you kill your Facebook account?
• How do you repair corrupt system files?
• Google Wave is open to everyone.
• Home Depot is going to pay an ex-employee more than twenty-five million bucks for an invention.

Usenet may be going offline for good, but our software center is here to stay!

Duke Pulls the Plug on Usenet

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!

Usenet is Still Useful

Chris | Live Tech Support | Video Help | Add to iTunes

http://live.pirillo.com/ – Before the Web existed… before BBS’s… and yes, even before forums… all we had was UseNet.

UseNet is basically a large online community, with smaller micro communities inside, via newsgroups. Back before there were even ISP’s, you could connect with other people from around the globe via UseNet. There are a multitude of newsgroups, for any topic you can possibly think of. Before the Web itself was born, and before ISP’s came along, you pretty much had to find UseNet from an educational or scientific institution. That dates me, doesn’t it? Yes, it’s true. I am old.

If you want to take a trip down memory lane, or even join in on some discussions, you can visit UseNet in its new location via Google Groups

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What is UseNet?