Re: Because someone asked a similar question in another group

In article <1212612557@xxxxxxxxx>, Wayne Throop <throopw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I was never on the mailing list, but I read rec.arts.sf-lovers when the
list was gatewayed to it, and there were recurring discussions about
whether the gateway was a good idea or not.

There was still some sort of gatewaying going on - I think very
selective - when I first showed up in rec.arts.sf.written in, I think,
1996 (at earliest 1995). I remember people asking why they'd gotten
notices that their article had been gatewayed, and wondering why none
of mine had - and since the gateway shut down completely years ago,
this is one mark of Usenet status I will *never* win.

(Eh, I shouldn't complain too much. Last night I was looking at some
of my posts from 2002, which was apparently my final Usenet annus
mirabilis, and one was the first on-topic post to news.announce.important
in five years. I was also titular head of newsgroup creation in
the Big 8 for one week in late, um, 2005? So hey... Not that the
ultimate outcome of that week pleased me at all, but you can't have
everything. Oh, and I did also post in 2002 the guide to Tiptree's
fiction that I still haven't updated, obSFnally speaking.)

Documentation of when I
first started reading usenet is lost in the mists of time and a few
relocations, but when I started, it was still possible, just barely,
for a mortal person to read the entire feed, or at least skim it all.

I read everything that interested me at the University of Chicago's
server sometime in March or April 1985, for a week. That was enough
to get through half of net.* in alphabetical order. So I don't think
I ever made it to net.sf-lovers, but Google has a few posts of mine to
net.games.frp. (Mercifully, it does *not* have my stupid newbie post
flaming someone who'd posted a screed on net.general.)

Whether it was possible, once you were caught up, to read the entire
feed then, I wouldn't know. I don't remember being on Usenet at *all*
between then and 1995. My brother told me about the Great Renaming.

While I can't recover the dates, I can approximate a "well it was the
year aunt Sarah had the gallstones out" kind of dating: for a while I was
keeping a record of my postings on Apple II floppy diskettes. My Apple
II had a serial number in the 600s, iirc. Came with a special deal on
memory; two rows of chips plugged in instead of one, totaling a mighty
8 kbytes. Its use on usenet came a few years after that, once it'd
been expanded to an incredible 48 kbytes and had the floppy disk added.
At that time I'd been reading usenet for at least a year.

Heh. One of the few decisions I got to make in person when my siblings
cleaned my mother's house was the fate of the Apple II. (It went into
the trash, I'm afraid.) I actually got a couple of programs to work on
it, one of which I wrote myself, despite never having anything more than
a tape drive; but it was certainly never online.

(Ah, heck, long as I'm bragging: yeah, the program I wrote myself was
in BASIC, but I wrote it without a working monitor *or* drive, and it
still worked. In other words, yes, one long session of typing. May be
the only program I ever wrote that worked on the first try, or perhaps
my memory has elided the agony of debugging via printer, I couldn't say.
But you want to say *your* Apple II experiences were uphill in both
directions? The program was a simple math program, to calculate
something like sunrise and sunset times, but I'm not sure that was
exactly it.)

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, tax preparer, bookkeeper and writer joe@xxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>
.

Relevant Pages

  • Enhancing the Gateway (Help Needed)
    ... Here's the short-story on the current situation with our mailing list to Usenet gateway: ... Our Usenet host rejects multipart/alternative messages ... we want to enhance the gateway to convert multipart/ alternative messages into something we can legally post to Usenet. ... require "nntp" ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Re: frankj problem
    ... User-Agent: vBulletin USENET gateway ... As the forums infiltrate Usenet via gateways, ... While I block Google Groupers in other newsgroups due to the high volume ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: HELLO!
    ... but there are no real membership rolls on usenet. ... where you are, not "Google Groups." ... Google provides one gateway into ... The leftover equipment is still ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: [LH] Death of rec.music.gaffa predicted...
    ... Well, there is another site that volunteered to run the gateway, the ... or just move the list to Google Groups and let Usenet RIP. ... I've tried posting to r.m.g. ... RMG is a moderated newsgroup with the moderation address set to LH. ...
    (rec.music.gaffa)
  • Re: Apple US MarketShare at 4.3%
    ... >> Jim Polaski wrote: ... >> "Apple Computer and Gateway also continued to rebound. ... Maccies. ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
Loading