I was “there” during the early days of Usenet, back when:
- News was updated only twice a day, when our server dialed up another machine we had a mutual exchange with.
- Business cards had bang-paths on them. For example: harvard!cfisun!palladium!nw on an old one of mine.
- Articles were expired after just a few days because disk space was perpetually scarce.
- The Great Renaming happened (1987) and we went from everything being “net.foo” to comp.foo, news.foo, talk.foo, etc.
I just naturally assumed the modern world had done away with usenet, so I was amused/surprised to find it (“USENET”) as the answer to this clue in today’s Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle:
I have to wonder what percentage of Wall St Journal crossword puzzle enthusiasts have ever heard of usenet, let alone ever posted on it!
P.S. There is no Cabal.
