From amanda@visix.com Fri Oct 12 08:34 PDT 1990
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 11:25:58 EDT
From: amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker)
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Rich Rosen, etc.
X-IMAPbase: 1230225496 18
Status: O
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X-UID: 1

Oh, Rich is still around in one form or another.  These days he seems to
prefer flooding mailing lists instead of Usenet groups, though.

Another trivium: For a while, someone with the login "sjb" was doing
the job of rmgrouping stuff (this was well before the "guidelines").
Does anyone remember who he actually is, or any amusing anecdotes from
the Group Creation Dark Ages?

Also, any mention of net.general should surely mention Peter Honeyman's
definitive overly-general posting of "Does anyone know what time it is?"

--Amanda


From smb@ulysses.att.com Fri Oct 12 08:50 PDT 1990
From: smb@ulysses.att.com
To: amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker)
Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: Rich Rosen, etc. 
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 11:47:18 EDT
Status: O
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	 Oh, Rich is still around in one form or another.  These days he seems 
	to
	 prefer flooding mailing lists instead of Usenet groups, though.

	 Another trivium: For a while, someone with the login "sjb" was doing
	 the job of rmgrouping stuff (this was well before the "guidelines").
	 Does anyone remember who he actually is, or any amusing anecdotes from
	 the Group Creation Dark Ages?

	 Also, any mention of net.general should surely mention Peter Honeyman'
	s
	 definitive overly-general posting of "Does anyone know what time it is
	?"

	 --Amanda

I don't know if it's the same sjb; for a while, Adam Buchsbaum (alb) was
using his father's id, sjb.  (Sol Buchsbaum is a *very* high muckamuck
at AT&T...).

From mcm@rti.rti.org Fri Oct 12 08:52 PDT 1990
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 11:51:57 -0400
From: Mike Mitchell <mcm@rti.rti.org>
To: bjones@ucsd.edu, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: alternative pathalias
Status: RO
X-Status: 
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X-UID: 3

I wrote a program called 'mkpath' back in '82-'83 that competed with pathalias.
We used it on our pdp-11/60 because pathalias wouldn't fit.  My first version
did everything with disk files, but it was too slow.  I don't think I ever
released that version to the net.  Someone on the net did request that I send
him that version, as the version he used ran out of memory on his list of
~2000 sites.  My version was fairly simple; it looked for the shortest path.
Pathalias had code to deal with the speed of the connection.  I didn't have
the resources to use that sort of information.  When I got a VAX instead
of a PDP, I stopped working on 'mkpath'.  I also had a front-end to the mail
program that used the mkpath database.  I called the front-end 'nmail'.
I don't have any copies laying around, but I could check our news archives.
I was working at Ikonas Graphics at the time.  Their site name was 'ikonas'.

	Mike Mitchell					mcm@rti.rti.org
							uunet!rti!mcm
"There's laughter where I used to see a tear.		(919) 541-6098
 It's all done with mirrors, have no fear."

From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 09:04 PDT 1990
Status: RO
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	for bjones@ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 09:03:58 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: bjones@ucsd.edu, spaf@cs.purdue.edu
Subject: Re: The List again :-)
Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu


>items, but the first two to be added were the "Frequently asked
>questions" by Jerry Schwarz and Chuq's "Netiquette" article.  You
>might try to find them and ask the dates.

A note on the Netiquette document. It was one of the earliest (and if you
ask me a very successful) experiments in groupware. It was a document by
consensus with about 30 people throwing email around and working up various
pieces. I'm not sure I was as much writer as coordinator, although the final
draft was worked up by me.

I find it amusing that it is now six+ years old and is still relevant after
all the changes to USENET with only minor revisiion. I know of three
attempts to 'update' the thing since that time, either by people or groups.
In all cases, we ended up using the original. That is, IMHO, damn fine
writing (and a great example of what this net CAN be when it pulls together
instead of fighting...)

>>> (BT) Hoaxes etc. (kremvax)

>Ask Piet @ eunet.eu.net about this one.  He was the author.  1987?
>Chuq did the April Fools forgery of me warning about forgeries --
>still one of my favorites.

That's also one of my favorites. I have a copy -- I can reuse it EVERY year
and it's still funny.

I was also the person who posted the official notice of the termination of
the Annual April Fools Day contest for Greg Woods in 89 (cancelled for lack
or anything worth parodying -- itself an editorial comment). And the person
who posted the "First International Conference on Secure Information" for
Dennis Ritchie in 1988 (the *first* reference to my private organization,
Fictional Reality...). And the person who posted the notice for Mark Horton
about the "failure of the great renaming" (this was just after the Great
renaming was finished, and Mark announced that the Backbone had decided the
Great Renaming was a failure and we were going to go and name everything
*back*. That one probably had the highest return of "You're kidding!"
messages from folks who both believed and refused to believe...).

I am not, for the record, the idiot who posted the "James Tiptree" hoax in
SF-lovers. That was Brad Templeton, and probably needs to be noted, since it
travelled well beyond the net into various areas of fandom *and* got back to
the heirs of the estate and both pissed them off royally and made them
miserable. A commentary on how we can hose out lives of folks far removed
from computers if we aren't careful.

One quick note on the Great Renaming. It actually started up about 18 months
early when I brought up the idea. I fought and argued it for about a year
before finally giving up in disgust (this was my second Grand Retirement,
the first being, if I remember properly, after the net.wobegon wars). It sat
for a few months while people chewed on it and then Rick and Spaf brought it
back to life, cleaned it up a lot and got people to buy off on it. (this is
not an untypical situation on USENET: someone comes up with an idea, because
it's different it gets ripped to shreds, then later someone else revives (or
indepenedently thinks it up) and since it's no longer new and different has
a chance of implementing it. There was a while when it really frustrated the
hell out of me. Now I realize it's a matter of helping the net assimilate
concepts so they can deal with it -- so I tend to throw out lots of ideas to
the winds (or did, now that I'm in my final Grand Retirement. This time for
sure) and maybe someone will take it up or maybe not. Things definitely work
better when the group mind chews it up and spits out a consensus opinion
than when one person tries to do it alone, something I wish I'd understood
long ago...)

>>> (BT) The re-emergence of mailing lists

>The mailing lists never went away, really.

True. At some point (and I really don't remember why) I started the usenet
list of mailing lists. Later on, during one of my many retirements I handed
it over to Spaf. (someone in c.s.mac recently called me the "Frank Sinatra
of USENET" -- not inappropriately. I'd rather be the Robert Silverberg of
USENET, but what the heck).

>(it net.motss in this list somewhere as a milestone?)

You know, in the current environment of alt.sex.graphics.very.explicit,
doesn't our paranoia over the name of net.motss seem just a bit silly and
anachronistic? (just as an aside).

>>> (BT) The problems with the old releases of B news

>Continued at least into 1989 when I would get error messages when
>creating new moderated groups.

There are still problems here. One is trying to convert a moderated group to
an unmoderated one (which as far as I know I'm the only person to have done
so with comp.text.desktop). It's a great way to get inundated by thousands
of mail messages at the old moderators mailbox, since lots of machines
ignore it. An interesting form of sabotage for USENET (hope you don't mind
me mentioning it) might be to simply send out newgroups turning every group
moderated some day. I'm not sure whether the net would ever completely
straighten it out. Anyone for Grand Renaming II?

>The idea for the top level hierarchies I believe came from Mel
>Pleasant at the Usenix meeting.  I remember we decided the names of
>all the hierarchies at that time except for misc or rec, which Rick
>added later.

I think the one added later was talk. Talk was the only top-level domain
added specifically to allow admins to not carry groups -- the pariah groups.
This was done (if I remember correctly) because it was a lot easier than
simply trying to make them go away.



From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 09:14 PDT 1990
Status: RO
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X-UID: 5

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 09:11:00 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: April fool 2


Here's my Dennis Ritchie article. This was probably my personal favorite.

Path: inhp4!reserch!dmr
From: drm@reserch.uucp (Dennis Ritchie)
Newsgroups: news.announce.conferences
Subject: First International Conference on Secure Information Systems
Date: 1 Apr 88 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: 1 May 88 00:00:00 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Unix Research
Approved: taylor@hplabs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  %  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The System Security Society of Southern Saskatchewan and the University
of North Saskatechwan, Hoople campus announce the First International
Conference on Secure Information Systems. This conference will feature
a star studded panel of security and system experts from across the
computing spectrum giving boring papers and comparing notes on
security problems and possible solutions for existing and future operating
systems ane networking environments. 

Papers that will be given at the conference include:

	Richard Brandow, MacMag magazine: Computer Viruses as a form
		of social terrorism
	
	Dennis Ritchie, AT&T: Trojan Horses: Security Hole or Debugging Aid?

	Richard M. Stallman, Free Software Foundation: Passwords are a 
		Communist Plot, or Give Me Access to Your Computer, Dammit!
	
	Chuq Von Rospach, Fictional Reality: A Secure USENET, an Exercise
		in Futility.
	
	Greg Woods, NOAO: Benign Dictatorships in Anarchic Environments: A
		Case Study

	Peter Honeyman, University of Michigan: Security Features in
		Honey-DanBer UUCP, or Why a Flat Name Space is Good.
	
	John Mashey, MIPS Computers: RISC security risks on Usenet

	Peter G. Neumann, SRI: The RISKS Of Risk Discussion, or
		Why This Conference Should be Classified.

	William Joy, Sun Microsystems: Unix is Your Friend.

	Donn Parker, SRI: Breaking Security for Fun and Profit: A Survey

	Lauren Weinstein, The Stargate Project: Stargate Encryption;
		Turning Free Data into Revenue.

	Mark Horton & Rick Adams, The UUNET project: Security Aspects
		of Pay for Play on USENET.

	C. Edward Brown, National Security Agency: How to get USENET
		feeds when you don't exist, A Case Study.

	Gordon Moffett, Amdahl Corp.: The USENET anarchist's cookbook;
		An alternative to the backbone cabal

	John Quarterman, University of Texas: The USENIX social agenda
		and national security; A summary of Usenet discussions
		from Star Wars to Tar Wars.
	
	Landon C. Noll & Ron Karro, Amdahl Corp.: Public Key Encryption
		in Smail3.1; How to send E-mail that the NSA can't read
	
	A. I Gavrilov, KGB, North American Information Bureau: Exporting
		American Military Information via Encoded USENET Signatures,
		Theory and Practice.

The Conference will be held March 2 through 4, 1989 on the campus of the
University of North Saskatechwan in Hoople, Saskatechwan, Canada. Registration
is $195 until December 1, 1989, $295 afterward. For more information please
contact Professor Peter Schikele, Department of Computer Science, University
of North Saskatechwan, Hoople, Saskatechwan, Canada 1Q5 UI9. 

Note: This conference is a rescheduling of the conference originally
scheduled for October, 1988 but cancelled after the United States Department
of Commerce decided that the material was too sensitive to allow
non-American citizens to read (including the material written by the
Canadians on the committee). Because of this, the conference has been moved
to Canada, which doesn't have a complete Freedom of Speech written into it's
constitution, but has better things to do than worry about ways of
circumventing civil rights. Americans having trouble getting their papers
cleared for distribution at the conference should contact Professor Shikele
about setting up a direct uucp link for the troff source.


From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 09:14 PDT 1990
Status: O
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X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 6

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 09:09:33 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: The infamous spaf spoof


Here's my copy of the Spaf april fools message. Note that the Message-ID and
dates need to change on a yearly basis, but nothing's perfect. Also notice
that I tried VERY hard to include every trick I warned against in the body
of the message -- and a good chunk of people still didn't figure it out.

The question is, what am I going to do next year? (what did I do last year?
Nothing. Nothing was funny...)

Path: amdahl!walldrug!moscvax!perdue!spaf
From: spaf@cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: news.announce.important,news.admin
Followup-To: news.admin
Subject: Warning: April Fools Time again (forged messages on the loose!)
Date: 1 Apr 89 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: 1 May 89 00:00:00 GMT
Organization: Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.
Approved: spaf@cs.purdue.EDU

Warning: April 1 is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a USENET
tradition. On April Fools day comes a series of forged, tongue-in-cheek
messages, either from non-existent sites or using the name of a Well Known
USENET person. In general, these messages are harmless and meant as a joke,
and people who respond to these messages without thinking, either by flaming
or otherwise responding, generally end up looking rather silly when the
forgery is exposed. 

So, for the few weeks, if you see a message that seems completely out
of line or is otherwise unusual, think twice before posting a followup
or responding to it; it's very likely a forgery.

There are a few ways of checking to see if a message is a forgery. These
aren't foolproof, but since most forgery posters want people to figure it
out, they will allow you to track down the vast majority of forgeries:

	o Russian computers. For historic reasons most forged messages have
	  as part of their Path: a non-existent (we think!) russian
	  computer, either kremvax or moscvax. Other possibilities are
	  nsacyber or wobegon. Please note, however, that walldrug is a real
	  site and isn't a forgery.

	o Posted dates. Almost invariably, the date of the posting is forged
	  to be April 1. 

	o Funky Message-ID. Subtle hints are often lodged into the
	  Message-Id, as that field is more or less an unparsed text string
	  and can contain random information. Common values include pi,
	  the phone number of the red phone in the white house, and the 
	  name of the forger's parrot.

	o subtle mispellings. Look for subtle misspellings of the host names
	  in the Path: field when a message is forged in the name of a Big
	  Name USENET person. This is done so that the person being forged
	  actually gets a chance to see the message and wonder when he
	  actually posted it.

Forged messages, of course, are not to be condoned. But they happen, and
it's important for people on the net not to over-react. They happen at this
time every year, and the forger generally gets their kick from watching the
novice users take the posting seriously and try to flame their tails off. If
we can keep a level head and not react to these postings, they'll taper off
rather quickly and we can return to the normal state of affairs: chaos.

Thanks for your support.

Gene Spafford, Spokeman, The Backbone Cabal.



From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 09:15 PDT 1990
Status: RO
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X-Keywords:                 
X-UID: 7

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 09:12:06 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: April Fools 3


And this is the one I did for Greg. (unfortunately, the one I did on the
Great Renaming is dust, at least in my archives....)


Path: amdahl!walldrug!kremvax!aims!hao!encar!woods
From: woods@encar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Newsgroups: news.announce.important,news.admin
Followup-To: news.admin
Subject: April Fools called off!
Date: 1 Apr 89 00:00:00 GMT
Expires: 1 May 89 00:00:00 GMT
Approved: woods@encar.ucar.edu

It was announced today that the annual USENET April Fools Competition has
been called off. Officials for UGH, the USENET's Group for Humor, called off
the annual competition after they found that there was no USENET activity
that deserved parodying. This is the first time since the creation of USENET
that this event has been cancelled.

"Look at it from the point of view of a professional parodist," stated Greg
Woods, honorary chairman of UGH and the official Backbone Cabal
representative to the organization. "I think it's a symptom of the growth of
the net. Everyone takes everything much too seriously these days. You can't
poke fun at someone who has no sense of humor. USENET itself has lost that
sense of fun that it used to have back in the good old days."

Woods, a tall, balding man with a cherubic face continued "Look at the
last year, and what parody candidates do you see? Brad Templeton and
rec.humor.funny. A natural, right? Except the situation went out of
control and now we have a free speech/censorship hassle. It's not funny
when it's on the front page of the Boston Globe. JEDR would be a natural for
a parody, but I refuse to take advantage of a man without the ability to
understand the joke, much less appreciate it. Besides, he'd probably sue me
for being abusive to nerds or something. So he's out.

"I like a good joke with the rest of them. Ask anyone -- my sense of
humor is legendary on USENET. I always get asked to do the opening
monologue at the Usenix BOF. Last year, a group of people got together
and wanted to do a roast at Usenix for me, but for some reason it never
happened. I spent two hours in the conference room and nobody showed.
Must have been the weather or something."

"Anyway, we looked really hard at Salman Rushdie. That should have been
a natural. There should be *dozens* of people making Iran jokes. Are
there? Not when you're worried about someone coming and killing your
dog. We thought long and hard about doing an Ayatollah piece, but I
value my life too much. I'd rather ask Mark Ethan Smith out for a date.
Or spend an evening with Weemba in a gay bar. Or spend an evening with
Weemba *anywhere*, for that matter.

"What's that leave us? The Backbone Cabal announced its retirement.
What happened? Nothing. How do you parody silence? It shows how useful
the Backbone really was, but it's not parody material.  MES?  The
Brahm's Gang? Tim Maroney? There is no challenge in parodying what is a
parody to begin with. Chuq didn't even once announce the impending
death of the net!  He did go to work for Apple, but it's hard to tell
whether that means we should make fun of him or of Sun. Spafford's at
Purdue now, but making fun of *that* is like throwing a bucket of water
on a drowning man.

"We were getting really desperate! We even thought about cross-posting
a "Car for Sale" ad between nj.wanted and news.announce.important, but
we decided nobody would notice.  So we finally just called it all off.

"Face it. USENET just isn't fun any more. How can you parody something that
won't get the joke? We talked about this during the Backbone Cabal BOF and
Orgy at Usenix, since we were worried even then, but nothing came of it."

In a related announcement, Woods announced the first USENET Computer
Network Parody Annual.  "Rather than repeat them on the net, (or waste
$10 posting a message asking, 'does anybody have...') you can get these
jokes in book form.  The 1988 Annual has around 800 parodies, and costs
$9.95 + S/H. (USD) Send mail to parodybook@looking.UUCP for details on
how to order."

This message is copyright The USENET Community Trust. If you read this
message, you are in violation of our copyright and owe us a royalty. You can
absolve this violation in one of two ways: buy our book or send $2.95 to 
the "USENET Defense Fund, C/O Rick Adams, Box 13459-27A, Honolulu, Hawaii,
03199-3459."

You can copy and distribute this in whole or in part in electronic
form, as long as you don't try to read it, or pretend that you are the
one who came up with the idea.


From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Fri Oct 12 09:18 PDT 1990
To: Mike Mitchell <mcm@rti.rti.org>
Cc: bjones@ucsd.edu, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: alternative pathalias 
             <9010121551.AA12110@shrike.rti.org> 
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 11:17:46 EST
From: Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 8

That's the one!  It was mkpath, because I remember "nmail".

I was using it on our Vax, and distributed it to some other sites
and mkpath was in some use in various places around the net.

--spaf

From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 09:20 PDT 1990
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 9

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 09:16:53 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: (not) April Fools 4


This isn't actually an April Fools joke, but was probably the funniest thing
that I ever did in retrospect. At some point (I think I have it in my files)
I was doing some analysis of usenet security (such as it was) and ended up
writing a short paper explaining exactly, in complete, gruesome detail, how
to forge news articles and make them essentially non-traceable. This was
pre-nntp (which makes it even more trivial to be non-traceable. No
challenge).

I sent this paper off to backbone and moderators to get feedback (what I
missed, what I got wrong, what can be done...) from the folks -- and the
Risks moderator misinterpreted it as a submission and posted it in a Risks
digest. So there it was, in all its glory, telling any bimbo who can read
exactly how to screw with USENET. That was the last thing I wanted, and it
was syncronicity that it happened to be the RISKS group that did it, which
is what is funny about the situation -- it also didn't matter, because
evidently the only people who read RISKS knew all the hacks already or
aren't into it. The thing more or less sank without a trace...



From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Fri Oct 12 09:21 PDT 1990
To: Mike Mitchell <mcm@rti.rti.org>
Cc: bjones@ucsd.edu, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: alternative pathalias 
             <9010121551.AA12110@shrike.rti.org> 
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 11:17:46 EST
From: Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 10

That's the one!  It was mkpath, because I remember "nmail".

I was using it on our Vax, and distributed it to some other sites
and mkpath was in some use in various places around the net.

--spaf

From ulflunde@idt.unit.no Fri Oct 12 09:32 PDT 1990
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 1990 17:31:57 +0100
From: ulflunde@idt.unit.no
To: bjones@ucsd.edu
Subject: A mail list for USENET history buffs
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 11

Please sign me off the mailing list.
Thank you.

Ulf Lunde, <ulflunde@idt.unit.no>

From mstar!root@cis.ohio-state.edu Fri Oct 12 09:33 PDT 1990
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 12:22:19 EDT
From: bob@MorningStar.Com
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: distinctions
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 12

Just as a nicotine addict might say "I know all about quitting
smoking; I've done it dozens of times" or Zsa Zsa Gabor might comment
on her experience at marriage...

Let the archives record Chuq as the net's Most Frequently Retired
Person.

From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Fri Oct 12 09:43 PDT 1990
To: bob@morningstar.com
Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: distinctions 
             <9010121622.AA00368@volitans.MorningStar.Com> 
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 11:39:26 EST
From: Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 13

>> Let the archives record Chuq as the net's Most Frequently Retired
>> Person.

  The end of the net-Chuq predicted?  :-)

--spaf

From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 09:48 PDT 1990
Status: O
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 14

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 09:45:58 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: spaf@cs.purdue.edu, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re:  Renaming groups


>> wobegon -- gone completely
>> 	[rec.music.folk takes a good part of the reason for this to exist.
>> 	 if it had any volume (it doesn't) I'd suggest rec.radio or 
>> 	 rec.radio.npr]

One other quick note on net.wobegon. If you read my april fools postings and
note things like this in the Great Renaming, you might notice that I seemed
to go out of my way to pick on net.wobegon.

I did. The reason for this goes way back to the great Wobegon Wars, as I
call them. Early on I was of the opinion that we should not only be creating
groups, but that old/obsolete groups should be zapped as well. This goes
back to 1982 or early 1983. There was a long argument over this (some things
never change -- this is an issue the net never has come to grips with) with
the end result being about five groups that everyone more or less agreed
could go away -- and net.wobegon. The only group I remember as being deleted
was net.applic (applicative programming, whatever that is). 

The net.wobegon people were vicious. Absolutely and totally nasty. It was a
group that was simply not being used. One of their arguments, which echoes
stuff you still hear today, was they didn't need to use the group, they just
wanted it to exist so they new they were important.

Man, no asbestos in the world could have saved me from this flamewar. I was
crisped, and to this day I still cringe when I think of it. I don't think
I've ever seen a flamefest quite that nasty -- and I've been part of many of
the worst.


From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 10:12 PDT 1990
Status: RO
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                 
X-UID: 15

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 10:07:17 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: The Hamster Joke.


This history is not complete without The Hamster Joke. You must pester Spafford
until he reveals it to you.

(hmm. Does anyone remember the date of the first spelling flamewar?)



From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 10:19 PDT 1990
Status: RO
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                 
X-UID: 16

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 10:11:49 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: amanda@visix.com, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re:  Rich Rosen, etc.


>Also, any mention of net.general should surely mention Peter Honeyman's
>definitive overly-general posting of "Does anyone know what time it is?"

On a similar note, does anyone else remember the proposal for the group
"net.weather"? -- it was a place where people could ask for weather reports
in other parts of the country or something. This was, I might add, a SERIOUS
suggestion, not a joke group.



From chuq@apple.com Fri Oct 12 10:21 PDT 1990
Status: RO
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                 
X-UID: 17

	for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 10:15:52 -0700
From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>
To: bob@morningstar.com, spaf@cs.purdue.edu
Subject: Re: distinctions
Cc: usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu

>>> Let the archives record Chuq as the net's Most Frequently Retired
>>> Person.

>  The end of the net-Chuq predicted?  :-)

Ouch. 


From mstar!root@cis.ohio-state.edu Fri Oct 12 11:34 PDT 1990
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 14:00:15 EDT
From: bob@MorningStar.Com
To: chuq@apple.com
Cc: amanda@visix.com, usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject:  Rich Rosen, etc.
Status: RO
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                 
X-UID: 18

   Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 10:11:49 -0700
   From: The Wandering Phew <chuq@apple.com>

   On a similar note, does anyone else remember the proposal for the
   group "net.weather"? -- it was a place where people could ask for
   weather reports in other parts of the country or something. This
   was, I might add, a SERIOUS suggestion, not a joke group.

I didn't propose net.weather, but I later tried for a while to get the
National Weather Service TTY-style data stream into a NNTP-distributed
group, with appropriate expirations and geographical parsers.  Though
Steve Wolff said (of NSF backbone bandwidth) "crunch all you want,
we'll make more", I was turned down by the people in Colorado who are
in control of the data.  Seems they (a) still thought the stream would
need too big a hose and (b) had already sold it to various vendors for
satellite distribution.  Hacker pilots across the country were
dismayed, because we have to dial an 800 number rather than having it
delivered to our desktops.  Sigh...