From bjones Mon Sep 24 15:03:31 1990 To: usenet.hist Subject: Hello again ... X-IMAPbase: 1230225491 12 Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 1 Last June I wrote to all of you and promised a mailist for the discussion of the history of usenet. I promptly got over-committed for my time during the summer and was forced to let the project lie for a while. Summer's over. I am eager to get back to this project, and to the research that is behind my own interest in the history of the net. One item I acquired during my brief foray looking for documents about the net was a list of major events on usenet. The list, appended below, was provided by Brad Templeton (who is on this list) and he has agreed to let me release it to the list. I thought that it might be a good way to open up a new round of discussion about the het's history. I include Brad's original comments here and ask the same question. If there's something missing or out of order in the list, let's talk about it. Once we have a pretty complete list then we can try to fill in descriptions of those events. At that point we should have a pretty good collective history archive that people can use as a base for more detailed research. Thanks, bj -- >From looking!brad@watmath.waterloo.edu Mon Jun 25 18:47 PDT 1990 Subject: Re: Usenet history Here's a list of topics for a history of the net. Not all these are in the right order. I haven't included everything here. If you know an event that's not super-specific to a group, and you think was of prominent importance to the structure of the net, MAIL that to me. The human-nets digest on the arpanet The uucp program The A-news system (Bellovin, Truscott) The first newsgroups "fa" groups "net." groups The mistake of net.general Creating groups by typo or whim - net.joke, net.bizarre, net.flame, net.gdead net.wobegon and others Net goes international (Canada) (Spencer, Templeton) The B news software (Horton, Glickman) Pathalias software (Honeyman) Decvax and Bill Shannon's contribution Imminent death of net predicted Chain letters over the net. AT&T's contribution (allegra, ihnp4 etc.) Widespread net growth and international growth Forged article critical of Unix (1981) K News (proposal) Domain style naming (Postel et al) The net.jokes.q creation and deletion Formation of the "Backbone" net.women.only experiment Arpa mailing lists merge with usenet groups. Subgroups to divert traffic: net.startrek, net.abortion, source code discussion Imminent death of net predicted Hoaxes etc. (kremvax) The re-emergence of mailing lists net.columbia and naming debates The emergence of voting for creating newsgroups Notesfiles (?) RN & Kill files (Wall) News batching and compression Checkgroups messages (Spafford) THe problems with the old releases of B news Line Eater Bug Moderated newsgroups mod.announce mod.newprod and commercial information on the net netnews software implemented on VM (IBM Mainframes) Stargate (Weinstein) NSA Baiting in messages Imminent death of net predicted Big Net personal fights some result in lawsuit threats (Mark Ethan Smith) some result in people being bounced temporarily from the net (Maroney) some result in people being removed permanently. The great renaming (Horton) The merging of moderated groups into the hierarchy. The decline in propagation for groups outside of "comp" and "news" Creation of rec.humor.funny (first ultra-moderated non-mailing-list) (Templeton) Battle over the expiry dates on rec.mag.otherrealms. (Von Rospach) The attempt to form comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac. (Webber) Monthly postings, newuser group, commonly asked questions. Imminent death of net predicted The misnaming of soc.culture.china -> 30 day voting time. Attempt to remove talk.bizarre from the net for the "VOLUME,VOLUME,VOLUME" game. "jj@portal" (Rob Noha) begs for money on the net. General problems with Portal, and the issue of pay-for-access net sites. Attempts to form groups for drugs and sex. Creation of the "alt" hierarchy. UUCP project and .US domain. (Gilmore, Horton) Arbitron news statistics (Reid) Imminent death of net predicted Telebit releases the Trailblazer. UUNET arrives (Adams) (Seismo fades) Internet & TCP/IP begins to pervade the net. The backbone begins to fade. NNTP causes news to propagate too fast. PC-Pursuit Reliable links to Europe Crazy creation of groups in the alt hierarchy. (Weiner) alt.gourmand kepr rather than being renamed. (Reid) AT&T decides not to forward mail. "biz" and "inet" hierarchies. "Gnu" hierarcy. Imminent death of net predicted comp.sys.next violates voting rules AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporarily(?) comp.binaries.ibm.pc goes to 8 megs/month, gets moderated in first (and only) moderator election. (Dhesi) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts) Oct/88 Internet Worm (perhipheral to usenet) Nov/88 The battle over rec.humor.funny (Templeton, Richmond) C News (Spencer, Collyer) NN (actually started earlier) B News 3.0 (Raymond) alt.fusion, sci.physics.fusion More rec.humor.funny -- Jokebook, Expansion to GEnie, Denninger's vote Aquaria alt, rec, sci (sci.skeptic?) Battles about naming, Australian voting etc. shareware on usenet flow mapping bitnet merging into USENET, more newsreaders etc. more moderator copyright (telecom, sci.med.aids) June 89/ClariNet In Moderation Network More forgery alt.sex, alt.sex.bondage and "Cindy's Torment" -- cutoff at U of T, etc. AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI, NSFNet, FARRnet Confiscation of USENET sites involved with phrack. EUNet and its policies (pay for feed, limit feed, not all groups) rec.arts.erotica Alt explosion more alt bannings, rise of alt.sex trial newsgroups USENET over 10 megs/month BIFF and further use of forgery Alt.sex becomes #1 read USENET group comp.unix.sco -- debate over corporations and the net (yet again) June 90/"Internet Porno Ring"/Houston Chronicle This only touches some groups. Other groups all have their histories of battles, common questions, hoaxes, problem users and attempts to split the group. Groups that probably deserve a section are: sf-lovers (with drwho and startrek) women men sources (of various sorts) binaries (of various sorts) unix groups music.misc politics, philosophy and religion .. and many others .. news.* Plus chapters on: Groups that never made it UUPC, Xenix and the arrival of small machines Acroynyms, Culture and smileys Usenix and USENET From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 From: Rich Salz Date: Mon, 24 Sep 90 19:15:31 EDT To: bjones@ucsd.edu Subject: Re: Hello again ... Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 2 Feel free to forward this to the list. K News is a non-topic; it generated, what, a month or two of discussion? The renaming was instigated and done by Rick Adams because his news/sys file was getting unwieldy. Here is a paragraph culled from something I'm writing; it's been okay'd by pretty much everyone I mention in it: The first version of pathalias was written by Steve Bellovin while working on his doctorate at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill. He posted it to Usenet in around 1982, and included patches to picked it up and installed it on allegra, a Bell Labs machine at Murray Hill, NJ. At that time, allegra was the center of the UUCP mail world (a role since assumed by sites named ihnp4, seismo, and now uunet), and at the time when Usenet was starting to explode all over the place. Before he left for Princeton, Peter had moved from tweaking the options, to doing serious redesign of most of the algorithms. Peter is still maintaining the program, and it his followed him out to the University of Michigan. John Gilmore and Brian Reid, with help from Carl at pyramid, created alt. I think the reasons were that Brian didn't like mod.gourmand--> rec.recipes, and that John didn't like having no unmoderated source group. I would contact them at first, however. The UUCP project was started by Horton, with Weinstein, and Mel. It's now folded down into just UUCP maps. I believe that Rutgers basically pays for the coordination. :-) AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI -- non-issues. NNTP and the large-scale gatewaying into newsgroups is Erik Fair's doing. I think gnu.* came about while Karl was in the shower. :-) /r$ From smb@ulysses.att.com Mon Sep 24 17:30 PDT 1990 From: smb@ulysses.att.com To: bjones@UCSD.EDU (Bruce Jones) Subject: Re: Hello again ... Date: Mon, 24 Sep 90 20:30:11 EDT Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 3 Did I ever send you a copy of the draft paper by myself, Horton, and Spaf? From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 To: bjones@ucsd.edu (Bruce Jones) Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: Re: Hello again ... <9009242203.AA04892@weber.ucsd.edu> Date: Mon, 24 Sep 90 20:58:09 EST From: Gene Spafford Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 4 It's a good list, but many things are way out of order. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to participate very actively in getting it straightened out right now.... Let me suggest that you try to preface each item in the list with a date of at least a year, and a year/month if possible. A couple to get you started: * monthly postings of newsgroups -- pre 1981 * monthly postings of FYI stuff about 1984 * moderated groups -- late 1986 (after summer Usenix in Atlanta) * checkgroups -- late 1986 * grand renaming -- started July 86, ended March 87 * backbone creation, circa 1984 * backbone goes away, 1987 --spaf From trt@rti.rti.org Tue Sep 25 06:57 PDT 1990 Date: Tue, 25 Sep 90 09:57:27 -0400 From: Thomas Truscott To: bjones@UCSD.EDU Subject: Re: Hello again ... Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 5 Other topics: The "technological matrix" that made Usenet possible: Unix, uucp, cheap modems, a sufficient "market" for Unix that people would pay phone bills, etc. The first newsgroups "fa" groups "net." groups The mistake of net.general The very first news groups were "NET." and local groups such as "dept". Later Horton et al. oversaw the lower-casing of NET. Only when ucbvax joined the net did "fa" appear. Indeed I was unaware of the Arpanet mailing lists such as human-nets until ucbvax enlightened us. But in retrospect the events all seem inevitable. I think "FidoNet" was invented in ignorance of Usenet (and vice-versa, I'm not sure of the dates for FidoNet). Imminent death of net predicted A common thread here is "junk news". Such as the woman in New Jersey posting "Dinette Set for Sale" that went everywhere (e.g. to Australia). June 90/"Internet Porno Ring"/Houston Chronicle Oh my! Do you have a copy of this? smileys I sure would like to know who invented this. Any idea how old :-) is? Someone posted an article on it in 1981 or maybe 1982, I think. Did it predate that? I don't remember. Maybe it is worth dredging through our old news tapes. Tom Truscott From bjones Tue Sep 25 08:23:19 1990 To: smb@ulysses.att.com Subject: Re: Hello again ... Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 6 Yes, I got the paper. Is there any chance that you are going to do further work on it? I have some comments if you're interested. bj From smb@ulysses.att.com Tue Sep 25 08:24 PDT 1990 From: smb@ulysses.att.com To: bjones@UCSD.EDU (Bruce Jones) Subject: Re: Hello again ... Date: Tue, 25 Sep 90 11:24:23 EDT Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 7 Probably will, but I don't know when. | From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 To: bjones@UCSD.EDU, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: Re: Hello again ... Date: 26 Sep 90 09:26:06 EDT (Wed) From: mark@stargate.COM (Mark Horton) Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 8 This is a pretty good list. I'm especially impressed with the parts before Canada joined, since the list is from Brad. Let me suggest a few things. The human-nets digest on the arpanet human-nets and sf-lovers were both equally important. The uucp program The A-news system (Bellovin, Truscott) "NET." newsgroups. The January 1980 Usenix conference when Duke invited sites to join Usenet. Early help from Bell Labs site "research" as the first cross-country link. Publicity spurs growth of the net (Horton) The first newsgroups "fa" groups "net." groups i.e. the renaming of NET to be net The mistake of net.general Creation of first nontechnical newsgroups: net.jokes and net.rumor Creating groups by typo or whim - net.joke, net.bizarre, net.flame, net.gdead net.wobegon and others Net goes international (Canada) (Spencer, Templeton) The B news software (Horton, Glickman) Pathalias software (Honeyman) (I think pathalias came later, and was written by Bellovin.) Decvax and Bill Shannon's contribution The first used car ad probably belongs in here somewhere. Imminent death of net predicted Chain letters over the net. AT&T's contribution (allegra, ihnp4 etc.) Widespread net growth and international growth Forged article critical of Unix (1981) K News (proposal) Domain style naming (Postel et al) The net.jokes.q creation and deletion Formation of the "Backbone" net.women.only experiment Arpa mailing lists merge with usenet groups. Subgroups to divert traffic: net.startrek, net.abortion, source code discussion Imminent death of net predicted Hoaxes etc. (kremvax) The re-emergence of mailing lists The UUCP Project (Horton et al) net.columbia and naming debates The emergence of voting for creating newsgroups Notesfiles (?) Notesfiles were around before Netnews at U of I - they belong after "uucp prog" RN & Kill files (Wall) News batching and compression Checkgroups messages (Spafford) THe problems with the old releases of B news Line Eater Bug Moderated newsgroups mod.announce mod.newprod and commercial information on the net netnews software implemented on VM (IBM Mainframes) Stargate (Weinstein) NSA Baiting in messages Imminent death of net predicted Big Net personal fights some result in lawsuit threats (Mark Ethan Smith) some result in people being bounced temporarily from the net (Maroney) some result in people being removed permanently. The great renaming (Horton) Actually, Rick Adams was the prime force behind this. The merging of moderated groups into the hierarchy. The decline in propagation for groups outside of "comp" and "news" Creation of rec.humor.funny (first ultra-moderated non-mailing-list) (Templeton) Battle over the expiry dates on rec.mag.otherrealms. (Von Rospach) The attempt to form comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac. (Webber) Monthly postings, newuser group, commonly asked questions. Imminent death of net predicted The misnaming of soc.culture.china -> 30 day voting time. Attempt to remove talk.bizarre from the net for the "VOLUME,VOLUME,VOLUME" game. "jj@portal" (Rob Noha) begs for money on the net. General problems with Portal, and the issue of pay-for-access net sites. Attempts to form groups for drugs and sex. Creation of the "alt" hierarchy. UUCP project and .US domain. (Gilmore, Horton) Arbitron news statistics (Reid) Imminent death of net predicted Telebit releases the Trailblazer. UUNET arrives (Adams) (Seismo fades) Internet & TCP/IP begins to pervade the net. The backbone begins to fade. NNTP causes news to propagate too fast. PC-Pursuit Reliable links to Europe Crazy creation of groups in the alt hierarchy. (Weiner) alt.gourmand kepr rather than being renamed. (Reid) AT&T decides not to forward mail. "biz" and "inet" hierarchies. "Gnu" hierarcy. Imminent death of net predicted comp.sys.next violates voting rules AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporarily(?) comp.binaries.ibm.pc goes to 8 megs/month, gets moderated in first (and only) moderator election. (Dhesi) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts) Oct/88 Internet Worm (perhipheral to usenet) Nov/88 The battle over rec.humor.funny (Templeton, Richmond) C News (Spencer, Collyer) NN (actually started earlier) B News 3.0 (Raymond) alt.fusion, sci.physics.fusion More rec.humor.funny -- Jokebook, Expansion to GEnie, Denninger's vote Aquaria alt, rec, sci (sci.skeptic?) Battles about naming, Australian voting etc. shareware on usenet flow mapping bitnet merging into USENET, more newsreaders etc. more moderator copyright (telecom, sci.med.aids) June 89/ClariNet In Moderation Network More forgery alt.sex, alt.sex.bondage and "Cindy's Torment" -- cutoff at U of T, etc. AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI, NSFNet, FARRnet Confiscation of USENET sites involved with phrack. EUNet and its policies (pay for feed, limit feed, not all groups) rec.arts.erotica Alt explosion more alt bannings, rise of alt.sex trial newsgroups USENET over 10 megs/month Surely you mean over 10 megs/day. It's about 12.5 now. BIFF and further use of forgery Alt.sex becomes #1 read USENET group comp.unix.sco -- debate over corporations and the net (yet again) June 90/"Internet Porno Ring"/Houston Chronicle General comment: the volume of Netnews (in MB/day) has doubled every year since Usenet was started, and it shows no signs of letting up. Mark From rsalz@bbn.com Wed Sep 26 07:10 PDT 1990 From: Rich Salz Date: Wed, 26 Sep 90 10:00:58 EDT To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: How the mapping started Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 9 Mark can probably fill in the gaps, and time-frame, for this. Early Usenix proceedings (I guess anything before Portland counts as early these days) have reports from the UUCP Mapping Project, and I think a map, too. >From sob@harvisr.harvard.edu Mon Nov 27 21:28:17 1989 Date: Mon, 27 Nov 89 20:36:11 EST From: Scott Bradner To: rsalz@BBN.COM Subject: Re: Questions about the start of the mapping projecdt Well, The original data was collected by Steve Bellovin but he sort of gave up at some point. I think that Peter Honeyman did some collecting back then also. At that time I was running wjh12 as a internet/uucp/bitnet gateway. I needed some better data. So I: 1/ had a programmer here rig up a scan-the-news-headers program to get an operating base 2/ sent out: a) a posting to some newsgroup asking for the info b) letters to usenet & root at all nodes that I had found by scanning headers c) then to all nodes found in the new data When I started the process I got calls from Rob Kolstad & Mark Horton Rob offered to help in the data gathering, we agreed to have him start at one end of the alphebet & me at the other. Mark was about to do the same thing, Rob & I agreed to pass on the data to Mark as we got it done. After the 1st full pass, Rob & I passed all operations over to Mark & the mapping project. Scott From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Fri Sep 28 16:01 PDT 1990 To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: Re: How the mapping started Date: 28 Sep 90 18:05:19 EDT (Fri) From: mark@stargate.COM (Mark Horton) Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 10 Maps are a very good point. The first maps from about 1981 had about 15 sites on them and were drawn in ASCII. (This for Usenet.) They grew until in 1983 or so they were too big for ASCII and they were drawn on paper. My ex-wife Karen and I did these early maps, got copies, and handed them out at Usenix conferences. After awhile, Bill and Karen Shannon took this over (around 1984-5) and made multi-page ASCII maps of Usenet. After about 1985 the net was too big for this. Recently Brian Reid has put out Postscript geographical maps of Usenet. The earliest UUCP (email) maps were in people's heads - they would use the Usenet map to route mail. Every so often someone would post a message "I'm going to make a map, everybody send me your L.sys file" and 6 months later they would emerge from under the avalanche of responses and give up. If I recall correctly, both Lauren Weinstein and Steve Bellovin did this at one time. The current map started when Scott Bradner and Rob Kolstad undertook the effort and stuck it out enough to finish the map. At that time they handed it over to our UUCP Project which was organized with 10 or so regional coordinators to maintain it and post it regularly. The UUCP Project, which was founded by Karen Summers and I took over in 1986, ran from 1985 to 1988. It did the UUCP Map (Mel Pleasant supervised the regional coordinators), produced and distributed smail 2 (Chris Seiwald and Larry Auton were the authors) and did domain registrations for UUCP sites (myself and Tim Thompson). In 1988, UUNET offered virtually free domain registrations, and we closed down the domain and software parts of the UUCP Project. Mel took on the mapping portion in conjunction with UUNET. He's still doing it today. Mark From bjones Wed Oct 10 17:49:40 1990 To: usenet.hist Subject: The List again :-) Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 11 Here is the latest copy of the list. What I tried to do was to take Mark's suggestion about dates and apply it to what I already had. I also took the comments of other people and incorporated them into the list. If you have time and the interest please look this over and see if there's anything you want to comment on. Maybe the way to deal with the list would be to break it down into smaller pieces. I'm open to suggestions as to where to make the breaks. This is still mostly Brad's list. The lines that begin with (BT) are from his original work. Additional topics are provided as noted. Comments on the list are credited to the originators. [My own questions about specific things are in brackets -bj] Lastly what the list needs most are dates. The year of an event is fine but if you can approximate month and year please put them in and return the list. I'll do a recompilation in a week or so. List Begins Here: (BT) The human-nets digest on the arpanet >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > human-nets and sf-lovers were both equally important. (BT) The uucp program (BT) Notesfiles >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > Notesfiles were around before Netnews at U of I - they belong after "uucp prog" (BT) The A-news system (Bellovin, Truscott) (BT) The first newsgroups "fa" groups "net." groups >From trt@rti.rti.org Tue Sep 25 06:57 PDT 1990 > The very first news groups were "NET." and local groups > such as "dept". Later Horton et al. oversaw the lower-casing of NET. > Only when ucbvax joined the net did "fa" appear. > Indeed I was unaware of the Arpanet mailing lists > such as human-nets until ucbvax enlightened us. >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > i.e. the renaming of NET to be net (BT) The mistake of net.general [What was the mistake of net.general? -bj] (BT) Creating groups by typo or whim - net.joke, net.bizarre, net.flame, net.gdead net.wobegon and others (BT) Net goes international (Canada) (Spencer, Templeton) (BT) The B news software (Horton, Glickman) (BT) Pathalias software (Honeyman) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > The first version of pathalias was written by Steve Bellovin while > working on his doctorate at the University of North Caroline at Chapel > Hill. He posted it to Usenet in around 1982, and included patches to > picked it up and installed it on allegra, a Bell Labs machine at Murray > Hill, NJ. At that time, allegra was the center of the UUCP mail world (a > role since assumed by sites named ihnp4, seismo, and now uunet), and at the > time when Usenet was starting to explode all over the place. Before he > left for Princeton, Peter had moved from tweaking the options, to doing > serious redesign of most of the algorithms. Peter is still maintaining > the program, and it has followed him out to the University of Michigan. >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > (I think pathalias came later, and was written by Bellovin.) (BT) Decvax and Bill Shannon's contribution >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > The first used car ad probably belongs in here somewhere. (BT) Chain letters over the net. (BT) AT&T's contribution (allegra, ihnp4 etc.) (BT) Widespread net growth and international growth (BT) Forged article critical of Unix (1981) (BT) K News (proposal) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > K News is a non-topic; it generated, what, a month or two of discussion? (BT) Domain style naming (Postel et al) (BT) The net.jokes.q creation and deletion (BT) Formation of the "Backbone" >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > backbone creation, circa 1984 >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > monthly postings of FYI stuff about 1984 [What's this one all about? -bj] (BT) net.women.only experiment (BT) Arpa mailing lists merge with usenet groups. (BT) Subgroups to divert traffic: (BT) net.startrek, net.abortion, source code discussion (BT) Hoaxes etc. (kremvax) [Is there a copy of the kremvax article floating around somewhere? I once saw a copy but ... -bj] (BT) The re-emergence of mailing lists (BT) net.columbia and naming debates >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > The UUCP Project (Horton et al) [Mark places this here chronologically if I read his message correctly. Is this different from the earlier mention of the uucp program? -bj] (BT) The emergence of voting for creating newsgroups (BT) RN & Kill files (Wall) (BT) News batching and compression (BT) Checkgroups messages (Spafford) >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > checkgroups -- late 1986 (BT) The problems with the old releases of B news (BT) Line Eater Bug (BT) Moderated newsgroups: a) mod.announce b) mod.newprod and commercial information on the net >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > moderated groups -- late 1986 (after summer Usenix in Atlanta) (BT) netnews software implemented on VM (IBM Mainframes) (BT) Stargate (Weinstein) (BT) NSA Baiting in messages (BT) Big Net personal fights a) some result in lawsuit threats (Mark Ethan Smith) b) some result in people being bounced temporarily from the net (Maroney) c) some result in people being removed permanently. (BT) The great renaming (Horton) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > The renaming was instigated and done by Rick Adams because his > news/sys file was getting unwieldy. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > grand renaming -- started July 86, ended March 87 >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > Actually, Rick Adams was the prime force behind this. (BT) The merging of moderated groups into the hierarchy. (BT) The decline in propagation for groups outside of "comp" and "news" (BT) Creation of rec.humor.funny (first ultra-moderated non-mailing-list) (Templeton) (BT) Battle over the expiry dates on rec.mag.otherrealms. (Von Rospach) (BT) The attempt to form comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac. (Webber) (BT) Monthly postings, newuser group, commonly asked questions. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > monthly postings of newsgroups -- pre 1981 (BT) The misnaming of soc.culture.china -> 30 day voting time. (BT) Attempt to remove talk.bizarre from the net for the "VOLUME,VOLUME, VOLUME" game. (BT) "jj@portal" (Rob Noha) begs for money on the net. (BT) General problems with Portal, and the issue of pay-for-access net sites. (BT) Attempts to form groups for drugs and sex. (BT) Creation of the "alt" hierarchy. >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > John Gilmore and Brian Reid, with help from Carl at pyramid, created > alt. I think the reasons were that Brian didn't like mod.gourmand--> > rec.recipes, and that John didn't like having no unmoderated source > group. I would contact them at first, however. (BT) UUCP project and .US domain. (Gilmore, Horton) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > The UUCP project was started by Horton, with Weinstein, and Mel. (BT) Arbitron news statistics (Reid) (BT) Telebit releases the Trailblazer. (BT) UUNET arrives (Adams) (Seismo fades) (BT) Internet & TCP/IP begins to pervade the net. The backbone begins to fade. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > backbone goes away, 1987 (BT) NNTP causes news to propagate too fast. >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > NNTP and the large-scale gatewaying into newsgroups is Erik > Fair's doing. (BT) PC-Pursuit (BT) Reliable links to Europe (BT) Crazy creation of groups in the alt hierarchy. (Weiner) (BT) alt.gourmand kepr rather than being renamed. (Reid) (BT) AT&T decides not to forward mail. (BT) "biz" and "inet" hierarchies. "Gnu" hierarcy. (BT) comp.sys.next violates voting rules (BT) AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporarily(?) (BT) comp.binaries.ibm.pc goes to 8 megs/month -- gets moderated in first, and only, moderator election. (Dhesi) (BT) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts) (BT) Oct/88 Internet Worm (perhipheral to usenet) (BT) Nov/88 The battle over rec.humor.funny (Templeton, Richmond) (BT) C News (Spencer, Collyer) (BT) NN (actually started earlier) (BT) B News 3.0 (Raymond) (BT) alt.fusion, sci.physics.fusion (BT) More rec.humor.funny -- Jokebook, Expansion to GEnie, Denninger's vote (BT) Aquaria alt, rec, sci (sci.skeptic?) (BT) Battles about naming, Australian voting etc. (BT) shareware on usenet (BT) flow mapping (BT) bitnet merging into USENET, more newsreaders etc. (BT) more moderator copyright (telecom, sci.med.aids) (BT) June 89/ClariNet (BT) In Moderation Network (BT) More forgery (BT) alt.sex, alt.sex.bondage and "Cindy's Torment" -- cutoff at U of T, etc. (BT) AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI, NSFNet, FARRnet >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI -- non-issues. (BT) Confiscation of USENET sites involved with phrack. (BT) EUNet and its policies (pay for feed, limit feed, not all groups) (BT) rec.arts.erotica (BT) Alt explosion more alt bannings, rise of alt.sex (BT) trial newsgroups (BT) USENET over 10 megs/month >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > Surely you mean over 10 megs/day. It's about 12.5 now. (BT) BIFF and further use of forgery (BT) Alt.sex becomes #1 read USENET group (BT) comp.unix.sco -- debate over corporations and the net (yet again) (BT) June 90/"Internet Porno Ring"/Houston Chronicle From smb@ulysses.att.com Wed Oct 10 19:48 PDT 1990 From: smb@ulysses.att.com To: bjones@UCSD.EDU (Bruce Jones) Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: Re: The List again :-) Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 22:44:16 EDT Status: O X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 12 I should have replied before this, but life has been very hectic even by my usual standards.... --Steve Bellovin ----- Here is the latest copy of the list. What I tried to do was to take Mark's suggestion about dates and apply it to what I already had. I also took the comments of other people and incorporated them into the list. If you have time and the interest please look this over and see if there's anything you want to comment on. Maybe the way to deal with the list would be to break it down into smaller pieces. I'm open to suggestions as to where to make the breaks. This is still mostly Brad's list. The lines that begin with (BT) are from his original work. Additional topics are provided as noted. Comments on the list are credited to the originators. [My own questions about specific things are in brackets -bj] Lastly what the list needs most are dates. The year of an event is fine but if you can approximate month and year please put them in and return the list. I'll do a recompilation in a week or so. List Begins Here: (BT) The human-nets digest on the arpanet >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > human-nets and sf-lovers were both equally important. Both were equally important to Usenet, but I believe that human-nets came first on the ARPANET. (BT) The uucp program The release of the uucp program with v7 UNIX provided the initial impetus. So did the Bourne shell. The very first version of netnews was a 3-page shell script. It supported multiple newsgroups, cross-posting, and subscription lists implemented as environment variables. As best I can tell, this script has not survived. (A few years ago, I did search for it, to no avail.) Another motivation was some sort of local news system. On V6, Duke and UNC had a local news system that came from Somewhere. But articles were limited to 512 bytes, and we didn't carry it forward to v7. A prime requirement was that there be a very efficient way to test for the presence of news (hence the checknews program). The original idea for netnews came from Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. (BT) Notesfiles >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > Notesfiles were around before Netnews at U of I - they belong after "u ucp prog" Notesfiles existed on Plato before this, but I don't think there was a UNIX version until after netnews. Even if there was an earlier one, the cultural thread was netnews-driven -- notesfiles was adapted to speak the netnews protocols. (BT) The A-news system (Bellovin, Truscott) Actually, I wrote a C language translation of my shell script; on an 11/45 that didn't even have 256K of memory, the shell was just too slow. This version (pre-A) is also lost. It was never released past Duke and UNC. Truscott and Steve Daniel wrote the version of A news that was released. Netnews was announced at Boulder Usenix (Jan '80), though the code wasn't quite ready. Some day, I'll write up what I remember of our design criteria. It's worth noting now that given the speed (or the lack thereof) of the machines we had, we utterly relied on the ease of writing shell scripts to experiment with protocol variants; compilation would have taken much too long. (BT) The first newsgroups "fa" groups "net." groups >From trt@rti.rti.org Tue Sep 25 06:57 PDT 1990 > The very first news groups were "NET." and local groups > such as "dept". Later Horton et al. oversaw the lower-casing of NET. > Only when ucbvax joined the net did "fa" appear. > Indeed I was unaware of the Arpanet mailing lists > such as human-nets until ucbvax enlightened us. Correct. The original concept was that most of the traffic would be of the form now known as unix-wizards (or whatever it's called this week). Growth was slow until Mark started feeding the mailing lists in because there was nothing to offer prospective customers. Given a ready source of material, people were attracted. It's interesting to note that (in my not very humble opinion) the quality of dialog (and the moderator's efforts) on human-nets are still essentially unsurpassed. Only comp.risks is a serious rival (and probably a superior); I exempt otherrealms from discussion because it's a different sort of beast. >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > i.e. the renaming of NET to be net (BT) The mistake of net.general [What was the mistake of net.general? -bj] net.general was a group intended to be read by everyone. This worked while the net was still small. (BT) Creating groups by typo or whim - net.joke, net.bizarre, net.flame, net.gdead net.wobegon and others The first joke newsgroups were net.suicide (the original article called for a meeting of some university suicide club on the roof of a building) and net.dead-babies, which contained a series of AP wire stories on a school bus accident. I seem to recall a specific incident that prompted a particular individual to create them, but I no longer remember what it was. (BT) Net goes international (Canada) (Spencer, Templeton) I've been wondering of late if that will ultimately be the greatest contribution of the net to history -- that it provides a cheap, reasonably accessible, mechanism for multi-way international communication. (BT) The B news software (Horton, Glickman) The important point here is that B news -- as most of the enhancements to netnews software -- was load-driven. The original A news had a number of design choices that made it unsuitable for a large net. (We estimated a maximum size of 100 sites, and 1-2 articles a day, net-wide....). Many of the deficiencies could have been patched around (and indeed, many were in A+ news); the key problem was that the last-read time was a global concept that applied to all newsgroups; you couldn't read things out of order. The goal there (and in many other spots) was to have software free of databases, and especially central databases. Instead, we chose to let the file system do the work. This also worked to eliminate most of the explicit synchronization. For example, article id's were limited to 14 characters or less, and named the file in /usr/spool/news that held the text. No history file was needed for duplicate detection; stat() would tell you that. Etc. (BT) Pathalias software (Honeyman) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > The first version of pathalias was written by Steve Bellovin while > working on his doctorate at the University of North Caroline at Chapel > Hill. He posted it to Usenet in around 1982, and included patches to > picked it up and installed it on allegra, a Bell Labs machine at Murra y > Hill, NJ. At that time, allegra was the center of the UUCP mail world (a > role since assumed by sites named ihnp4, seismo, and now uunet), and a t the > time when Usenet was starting to explode all over the place. Before h e > left for Princeton, Peter had moved from tweaking the options, to doin g > serious redesign of most of the algorithms. Peter is still maintainin g > the program, and it has followed him out to the University of Michigan . Rich's chronology is about right, though I no longer remember the exact dates. (Incidentally, there's apparently a line missing from the above paragraph. Peter brought the code up on allegra.) I also tried to gather the data, but the effort was too much for me. The data arrived in very ``dirty'' form, and especially after I join the Labs I had no time to reconcile it all. And yes, the code is essentially all Peter's now; virtually nothing remains of my original. >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > (I think pathalias came later, and was written by Bellovin.) (BT) Decvax and Bill Shannon's contribution This was moderately early; they picked up the slack when assorted AT&T sites no longer could/would. >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > The first used car ad probably belongs in here somewhere. The true meaning here is rather amusing. When we were arguing over the design of the protocols, I argued strongly for many local -- single-machine -- groups, with the sole group NET to be broadcast. Jim Ellis pointed out the need for regional group for things like used car ads; thus, NET.* was born. (Originally, network-wide groups were identified syntactically; hence the use of all caps to distinguish them from anything local.) Jim prevailed (fortunately); naturally, we were all very amused when the first used car ad showed up on NET.general. The original designers all sent congratulatory messages to the perplexed poster. We discussed, but never resolved, the difference between a distribution and an interest group. No solution seemed right. 11 years later, the current implementation suffers from all the faults we talked about way back when. (BT) Chain letters over the net. This was later, I think. (BT) AT&T's contribution (allegra, ihnp4 etc.) Research and mhtsa were much earlier, and I think vax135. (BT) Widespread net growth and international growth (BT) Forged article critical of Unix (1981) This was not so much a pure forged article as a forgery designed to conceal the unauthorized posting of a critical paper by Don Norman. (BT) K News (proposal) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > K News is a non-topic; it generated, what, a month or two of discussio n? (BT) Domain style naming (Postel et al) I don't think this is particularly related to Usenet. The impact of Usenet on the ARPANET was more as a (strong) catalyst to force re-examination (and benign neglect) on the strict policies against interconnection. Uucp mail into the ARPANET became a major force long before it was legit. And it was obviously known to, and ignored by, many of the Powers that Were. (BT) The net.jokes.q creation and deletion (BT) Formation of the "Backbone" >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > backbone creation, circa 1984 >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > monthly postings of FYI stuff about 1984 [What's this one all about? -bj] (BT) net.women.only experiment (BT) Arpa mailing lists merge with usenet groups. Comparatively early. (BT) Subgroups to divert traffic: (BT) net.startrek, net.abortion, source code discussion (BT) Hoaxes etc. (kremvax) [Is there a copy of the kremvax article floating around somewhere? I once saw a copy but ... -bj] (BT) The re-emergence of mailing lists (BT) net.columbia and naming debates >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > The UUCP Project (Horton et al) [Mark places this here chronologically if I read his message correctly. Is this different from the earlier mention of the uucp program? -bj] I assume this is the UUCP Mapping Project, which was designed to supply the data for pathalias. (BT) The emergence of voting for creating newsgroups (BT) RN & Kill files (Wall) Note again that this was a load-driven development. (BT) News batching and compression Ditto. (BT) Checkgroups messages (Spafford) >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > checkgroups -- late 1986 The whole issue of control messages was and is troubling. The original versions of netnews had no control functions because we knew we couldn't authenticate the messages. (Yes, we knew about public key cryptography and digital signatures. If nothing else -- and I had read the RSA paper by then -- V7 included enroll/xsend/xget.) Some of the code to handle some messages was dangerously buggy in the early days. I interviewed at the Labs very soon after B news came out. When I entered the office of a Very Prominent UNIX guru, the first words out of his mouth were ``Netnews B is a tool of the devil''. (As an example of an early bug, the code would honor requests to rmgroup ../../../../../.. -- and recall that v7 did not honor setuid if root did the exec.) (BT) The problems with the old releases of B news (BT) Line Eater Bug (BT) Moderated newsgroups: a) mod.announce b) mod.newprod and commercial information on the net Here we see a return to syntactic decisions. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > moderated groups -- late 1986 (after summer Usenix in Atlanta) (BT) netnews software implemented on VM (IBM Mainframes) (BT) Stargate (Weinstein) (BT) NSA Baiting in messages Not really significant of anything but paranoia, if you ask me. (BT) Big Net personal fights a) some result in lawsuit threats (Mark Ethan Smith) b) some result in people being bounced temporarily from the net (Maroney) c) some result in people being removed permanently. (BT) The great renaming (Horton) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > The renaming was instigated and done by Rick Adams because his > news/sys file was getting unwieldy. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > grand renaming -- started July 86, ended March 87 >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > Actually, Rick Adams was the prime force behind this. (BT) The merging of moderated groups into the hierarchy. (BT) The decline in propagation for groups outside of "comp" and "news" This was part of the hidden (but widely admitted) agenda of the renaming. In particular, there was a struggle to keep many groups out of ``talk'', which everyone knew would be the first to go. (BT) Creation of rec.humor.funny (first ultra-moderated non-mailing-list ) (Templeton) (BT) Battle over the expiry dates on rec.mag.otherrealms. (Von Rospach) (BT) The attempt to form comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac. (Webber) (BT) Monthly postings, newuser group, commonly asked questions. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > monthly postings of newsgroups -- pre 1981 (BT) The misnaming of soc.culture.china -> 30 day voting time. (BT) Attempt to remove talk.bizarre from the net for the "VOLUME,VOLUME, VOLUME" game. (BT) "jj@portal" (Rob Noha) begs for money on the net. (BT) General problems with Portal, and the issue of pay-for-access net s ites. (BT) Attempts to form groups for drugs and sex. This belongs earlier. (BT) Creation of the "alt" hierarchy. >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > John Gilmore and Brian Reid, with help from Carl at pyramid, created > alt. I think the reasons were that Brian didn't like mod.gourmand--> > rec.recipes, and that John didn't like having no unmoderated source > group. I would contact them at first, however. Certainly true of Brian. (BT) UUCP project and .US domain. (Gilmore, Horton) >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > The UUCP project was started by Horton, with Weinstein, and Mel. (BT) Arbitron news statistics (Reid) (BT) Telebit releases the Trailblazer. (BT) UUNET arrives (Adams) (Seismo fades) (BT) Internet & TCP/IP begins to pervade the net. The backbone begins t o fade. >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990 > backbone goes away, 1987 (BT) NNTP causes news to propagate too fast. >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > NNTP and the large-scale gatewaying into newsgroups is Erik > Fair's doing. (BT) PC-Pursuit (BT) Reliable links to Europe (BT) Crazy creation of groups in the alt hierarchy. (Weiner) (BT) alt.gourmand kepr rather than being renamed. (Reid) (BT) AT&T decides not to forward mail. (BT) "biz" and "inet" hierarchies. "Gnu" hierarcy. (BT) comp.sys.next violates voting rules (BT) AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporaril y(?) (BT) comp.binaries.ibm.pc goes to 8 megs/month -- gets moderated in firs t, and only, moderator election. (Dhesi) (BT) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts ) (BT) Oct/88 Internet Worm (perhipheral to usenet) (BT) Nov/88 The battle over rec.humor.funny (Templeton, Richmond) (BT) C News (Spencer, Collyer) (BT) NN (actually started earlier) (BT) B News 3.0 (Raymond) (BT) alt.fusion, sci.physics.fusion (BT) More rec.humor.funny -- Jokebook, Expansion to GEnie, Denninger's v ote (BT) Aquaria alt, rec, sci (sci.skeptic?) (BT) Battles about naming, Australian voting etc. (BT) shareware on usenet (BT) flow mapping (BT) bitnet merging into USENET, more newsreaders etc. (BT) more moderator copyright (telecom, sci.med.aids) (BT) June 89/ClariNet (BT) In Moderation Network (BT) More forgery (BT) alt.sex, alt.sex.bondage and "Cindy's Torment" -- cutoff at U of T, etc. (BT) AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI, NSFNet, FARRnet >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990 > AlterNet, NYSERNET/PSI -- non-issues. (BT) Confiscation of USENET sites involved with phrack. (BT) EUNet and its policies (pay for feed, limit feed, not all groups) (BT) rec.arts.erotica (BT) Alt explosion more alt bannings, rise of alt.sex (BT) trial newsgroups (BT) USENET over 10 megs/month >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990 > Surely you mean over 10 megs/day. It's about 12.5 now. (BT) BIFF and further use of forgery (BT) Alt.sex becomes #1 read USENET group (BT) comp.unix.sco -- debate over corporations and the net (yet again) (BT) June 90/"Internet Porno Ring"/Houston Chronicle