September 6, 2023 • 36 mins
Before the World Wide Web, savvy computer users were flocking to USENET to participate in discussions on everything from the latest advance in computing to the worst jokes you could imagine. USENET is still around today. So what the heck is it?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey Thearin,
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are
you today? I thought we'd talked about something that's both
a throwback and it's still very much current, which is
(00:26):
the networked communication system called us net. While I think
just about everyone is familiar with certain Internet related services,
you know, like email or web browsing, maybe to a
lesser extent, things like FTP, that sort of thingt I
think depends on the person. Some of you may have
(00:47):
only heard or seen references to UNT, some of you
may never have heard of it at all, And of
course I think some of you are probably very familiar
with it. In fact, from what I understand you, SET
is actually kind of experiencing some lot of a renaissance
among younger users like millennial and gen Z users. I
(01:07):
would not know. I'm gen X, so I'm out of
the loop everywhere. We're not even included in those articles
that are about all the different generations and how they
differ from each other. Gen X is always left out
of that, so I don't know what's going on with
my own generation. But I'm getting off track. So usenet
(01:27):
is older than the Web. When Tim berners Lee introduced
the technology that would underlie the Worldwide Web in the
early nineties, Usenet had already been a thing for more
than a decade at that point. So our story begins
in North Carolina, primarily at Duke University. You had a
couple of graduate students at Duke named Jim Ellis and
(01:51):
Tom Truscott, and they were experimenting. They were creating a protocol.
And remember, a protocol is a set of rules, a
set of instructions that a computer follows, and the protocols
define how computers do certain tasks. They were working on
one called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol or UUCP. Now,
(02:15):
you also had a student at the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill named Stephen Bellevian who would create software
that would leverage this protocol and allow people to interface
with it. He would become very important in the creation
of us neet. In fact, also he ended up writing
(02:36):
several articles about the history of us net that were
incredibly useful when I was putting this piece together. He
wrote them for a circleid dot com, so you can
go there and read. I think it's a nine part
series where he goes into detail, sometimes great technical detail,
which I will not be doing for this episode. I
think it goes beyond the scope of what I want
(02:57):
to do. Plus I'd be more likely to mess things
up than to save them correctly. Anyway, this protocol made
it possible for different computers to exchange files and messages
if they were networked to one another. And by computers
I'm really talking about like mainframes and mini computers at
this point, primarily mini computers. Now, a mini computer is
(03:21):
not the same thing as a desktop or a laptop.
Those would be micro computers. A mini computer was still
a big old honkin computer system, like back in the seventies.
So a mainframe could potentially take up an entire room
or sometimes even an entire floor of a building. That's
how big mainframe computers could be. A mini computer might
(03:43):
be as small quote unquote as the size of an
entire desk or maybe a couple of refrigerators. These machines
often had pretty significant computing power for the time, but
they were not nearly as powerful as mainframes, or did
they have the capacity to process as much information per
(04:05):
unit of time as a mainframe could. They were, however,
marginally not marginally, they were significantly less expensive than mainframes,
so they became a core component of computer science departments
of various you know, schools that were specifically centered around technology.
One of those mini computers was the PDP eleven from
(04:26):
DC and it could run the Unix operating system. So
you know, there's lots of different opring systems out there.
Unix is one of the big ones, often used in
things like like web servers and things of that nature.
Unix and Linux, whereas you know, we're mostly familiar with
either Mac up Brain system or Windows, depending on the
(04:48):
type of machine you use. Anyway, the mini computer PDP
eleven was the sort of computer system that graduate students
had access to. This this was before many computers would
be powerful enough to do anything significant in the computing world.
Like they were great for hobbyists. They had lots of
(05:11):
useful tasks, but they were extremely limited. They would not
be useful in a research capacity for the most part.
So the students also had access to dial up modems,
which at that time ran at a blistering three hundred
bps that stands for bits per second, so the three
hundred bits per second is actually not blistering. That was
(05:33):
just a joke. Also, at this point, hardware displays were
really rare. Like computer minors, you just didn't really have
them in a lot of these systems. So for a
lot of these mini computers, you would not get your
results displayed on a screen. Instead, it would print on
a sheet of paper. So you would make some code
and then you would get a print out of results
(05:56):
and that would be when you'd find out whether or
not your code was good. If it wasn't, it had
to go back and fix it and then print out again.
It was pretty wild stuff back in those days. Well,
it gets even better than that. The original use net
network relied on acoustic coupler modems. So this is the
kind of modem that, as the name implies, uses sound
(06:19):
acoustics to make connections between computers. So each computer would
have a modem that would have a coupler, and the
coupler would hold a handset of a landline telephone, so
you would take the telephone out of its cradle. You
would put the telephone into the coupler the right way,
so that the microphones on one side, the speakers on
(06:40):
the other. You would then dial the number of the
computer system that you were hoping to connect to, which
also would have a handset and a coupler, and then
your computer would make noises indicating either a zero or
a one, so bits in other words, through the coupler,
and these noise would travel over the phone lines, just
(07:02):
as voice communication would if two people were just talking
on the phone. So the motive on the other end
would receive these noises and the coupler would convert them
into voltage signals that the computer would then interpret as
bits as zeros are wants, and you could have communication
between computers this way. Now, the reason why the students
went with this specific method wasn't because that's the only
(07:23):
technology they had access to. Instead, it was because they
were trying to get around some pretty tough regulatory hurdles.
Back in those days, AT and T essentially had a
monopoly over phone communications within the United States, so this
approach helped sidestep some obstacles they would otherwise have faced
when trying to connect the systems together. Right because you're
(07:46):
doing a voice call rather than a data call, at
least as far as the telephone system is concerned. It's
just sending signals of sound across You're not using it
as a data connection per se. And so it was
a way to kind of sidestep the very steep prices
you would have to pay in order to have a
(08:08):
data connection. So, by the way, AT and T tried
desperately to fight that and to make it so that
they could still charge enormous amounts of money for those connections,
but ultimately they lost that particular court battle. Anyway, Stephen
Bellvan wrote software to create a sort of client, kind
of like a web browser. It was a client that
(08:30):
would serve as the interface for use net and the
UUCP protocol, which I know, I just was repetitive. It's
like saying ATM machine. And also the computer systems and
modems were all doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes
and stalling the software on different mini computers made it
possible to exchange information and files between these mini computers INI,
(08:55):
not A and Y. In fact, there were not very
many computers connected to use net at all initially, so
they called it use net, which is short for Users Network.
The first three computers connected to the network were in
Duke University Duke Medical School and the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill. Obviously it would grow from there. But
(09:18):
we're gonna have to really sit down and explain what
use net is and a bit about how it's organized,
to really get an understanding of what makes it special.
So if you're at all familiar with Reddit, the description
of use net is going to sound a little bit
familiar to you on a surface level. So the use
(09:39):
net network consists of discussion groups. These are called newsgroups.
These would be a lot like subreddits on Reddit. So
each newsgroup is dedicated to a specific subject or topic.
Users can read and at least in most cases post
to newsgroups. There are limitations on that. I'll talk about
that in a bit. And you can subscribe to specific
(10:02):
newsgroups so that you can keep up with the new
stuff that's posted to them. At least you can do that. Now,
that's not how it worked initially, because originally the client
that Stephen Bellvan programmed was limited to updating the information
based on the last time you access the newsgroup according
to the computer's logs, and it would give you all
(10:24):
the updates, so you couldn't just jump around and grab
just the stuff you were interested in in the one
newsgroup that you were Let's say that you are just
absolutely fascinated with Dudgeons and dragons, and that's the only
newsgroup you wanted to be part of, so that was
all you were focusing on. Well, with Bellevan's client, you
would get everything, not just that newsgroup. The reason for
(10:46):
this is that Bellvan felt that usenet wouldn't get that
much traffic. He thought maybe it would generate an article
or two per day, people would write a piece for
use net, or maybe you would get two pieces in
a day, and so it'd be a very small update
each day. So there's no reason to worry about it
because he was you know, at the time, we were
(11:06):
talking about three computers, and again there were many computers.
They were ones that you had to have access to
as a student to be able to even use in
the first place, so by by definition, it was limited.
Plus this is a you know, a newsgroup you would
only have access to if you had booked time with
that mini computer, which was a process. Right, you had
(11:28):
to access it, and that required you to sign up,
and you know, sometimes you had a log book and
everything so that you could have access to it so
that other students would know that at that time you
were accessing the computer system. Anyway, we're gonna take a
quick break. When we come back, I'll talk a little
bit more about some interesting comparison's contrasts with Reddit. Okay,
(11:59):
we're so. Reddit tends to be a place where users
share links to interesting stuff to a relevant subreddit reddit,
and then conversation will flow from there. So a fairly
typical Reddit post might have a headline associated with a
news story, and you could click through and that will
(12:19):
actually take you to the news story itself, or you
can click into the messages and read the conversation around
the news item. But I mean, you could just have
a Reddit post that just is an original piece, a
user generated piece. Maybe it includes a photo or a
gift or something like that. But that's typically the way
reddits work, especially in the subreds I go to. Those
(12:40):
are almost always about sharing articles and links to interesting stuff. Well,
us neet was just originally limited to plain old text.
There was no Worldwide Web yet, so you couldn't hyperlink
to a web page. Web pages didn't exist initially, you
couldn't upload a file to use net Folks did see
(13:01):
that would be really useful if you could do that,
if you could create a way to upload and download
files to and from us net, but it would require
a bit of work in order to make this possible.
As such, students started to work on a way to
allow for the uploading and downloading of binary files. So
binary refers to basic computer language. You know, it's zeros
(13:23):
and ones. Those zeros and ones can represent anything, you know.
We're talking everything from software to orchestral symphonies to the
dancing baby gif that was all the rage on the
internet thanks to Ali mcbeil man. I'm dating myself with
this episode. So these smarty pants students came up with
a way to encode binary data into text because that's
(13:48):
what us net could handle. It could handle text. So
you would take your program. You would then have to
convert your program into binary code. You would have to
convert the binary code into text and then upload that.
Someone else could then grab that thread of posts and
then use a decoder to decode the text back into binary,
(14:12):
and then finally convert the binary into whatever the original
file format was. So there are a lot of steps,
but it would work. But there was a catch because
used that articles have a limit as to how much
data they can hold. So typically uploading a file means
that the file is going to be split across multiple posts,
and by multiple I mean potentially lots of posts, because
(14:36):
if you're trying to download something significantly large, like today,
if you were trying to download a high resolution video,
you could be talking about thousands of posts that make
up this video. So part of the issue was that
early encoding methods would inflate the file size significantly, by
like forty percent, so the file would get even larger
because of the encoding method Now, fortunately, folks would come
(14:58):
up with alternatives and they would find ways to encode
the binary into texts that would reduce that overhead. Also,
keep in mind that when us net was a new thing,
the folks who were using it were relying on those
dial up modems. They had really hefty limitations and how
much data they could download per second, so we weren't
typically talking about big files at least in the early
(15:19):
days of use net. Anyway, the support for binary files
meant that us neet would become a way to communicate
not just through text, but through files as well. This
is as you might imagine that led to some issues
with piracy, but well that's a matter for another episode,
so we're just going to move on and keep on
talking about us net. So a fundamental feature of us
(15:39):
net is that it's not a centralized service. This is
another way we can contrast it with Reddit. While Reddit
has some surface level similarities to us net, beneath the
hood things are very different. So Reddit is essentially centralized.
It means that the service ultimately runs on servers that
Reddit either owns or leases from, like a cloud competing
(16:03):
provider such as Amazon Web Services. But the point is
the underlying foundation for Reddit is in a centralized group
of servers. Centralized in this case doesn't necessarily mean geographically
by the way. That's because networking gets all whibbly wobbly,
but it does mean that's in this definite, finite number
of servers, and that is where Reddit lives. Use net,
(16:26):
on the other hand, is decentralized. Anyone could create a
use net server. You'd have to download the right software,
but you could do it. So the way use networks
is more like a peer to peer network. So let's
say you create a use net server. You connect your
server to the use net network at large, You indicate
(16:47):
which news groups in particular you want to prioritize on
your server, and your server will regularly ping other servers,
the bigger nodes in use Net's network to look for
updates to those newsgroups and thus pull in new information
whenever there is new information, and then your users on
your server can access that. Now, let's say that your
(17:09):
users on your server create a newsgroup that gets a
lot of popularity, and eventually other servers on the us
net network are interested in that newsgroup, so they start
pigging your server and they get updates on your user's
newsgroup and they serve it to their users. So the
whole network is decentralized and to an extent asynchronous. You
(17:32):
might access a newsgroup and read an article and some
of the posts beneath it, and then you decide you
want to write your own response, So you create your
own response and you send it to post. Now that's
going to go to whatever server you're connected to through usnet,
But that doesn't automatically populate across every use net server
(17:53):
that carries that newsgroup. That you have to wait for
them all to sort of synchronize, which means that they're
there's going to be a time where some versions of
that news group are going to have your reply, some
versions are not, and it means that other people might reply.
They might even make the same point you made. If
you're unlucky, they might make it better than you did,
(18:14):
and then you just seem to be, you know, repeating
what someone else said. But when you wrote your post,
you had that that reply didn't exist, or at least
you hadn't seen it yet because yours had not synchronized
with the most recent information. So it gets a little
bit like muddy when you're talking about, you know, what's
(18:34):
the latest information on us net. Well, it really depends
upon which server you're talking about and whether or not
that was the point where new material was generated or
if in fact it's waiting to be propagated across the
entire network. Now. One benefit of this approach is that
us net is somewhat shielded against censorship and interference because
(18:58):
there's no one to shut down it's distributed right now.
That doesn't mean that an authority cannot try, and even
in extreme cases, sometimes succeed to take stuff off us net.
But it ain't easy. It is a pretty tough thing
to do because there's not any one entity you can
(19:18):
go to like you can't. You could go to Reddit
and demand Reddit remove something, which you may or may
not work, depending on the nature of the thing, but
you can't really do that with us net because again,
it's not one single entity that controls use net. It's
it's a hive mind. The structure of newsgroups actually follows hierarchies,
(19:40):
and that is like large categorizations. Right today, you could
argue the most famous use net hierarchy is the ALT hierarchy,
which is funny because the ALT in this case stands
for alternative, specifically an alternative to the big seven newsgroup
hierarchies that are seen as the more establish but whatever,
(20:01):
that's not how everything started. There were no seven hierarchies
when use net first started. In fact, in the beginning,
there were only three hierarchies of newsgroups, and all that
was posted should fall under one of the three, and
it was adequate. So the three hierarchies were net, FA, FA,
(20:22):
and mod mod, So all newsgroups started with one of
those designations. So you might have one that says like
net dot discussion that would be a newsgroup. The net
hierarchy was pretty much the catch all. It started as
a hierarchy for newsgroups that were focusing on conversations about
the network itself, but that rapidly expanded to non network topics,
(20:47):
so you would get people creating like net dot politics
or net dot jokes. The FA hierarchy was an acronym
for from arpinnet. It got started after a student at
the University of California at Berkeley named Mark Horton joined
usenet in nineteen eighty and started to add material from
an arpinet mailing list to the network. Access to Arpinet
(21:10):
was really limited. It was very difficult to get access,
so what Horton was doing was kind of a service,
was providing other people the opportunity to read these mailing lists,
when otherwise they would not have any access to those
mailing lists. So arpinnet was sort of a predecessor to
the Internet. It was the network where computer scientists and
engineers were developing the rules that would allow for Internet communication.
(21:34):
So some people say, like, it's the grandfather of the
Internet if you think of it that way. I think
that's a little oversimplification, but it kind of gets the
idea across. So Horton's contributions would lead to a new
hierarchy dedicated to sharing information from Arbennet mailing lists, the
FA hierarchy, And originally that was a read only hierarchy,
(21:57):
so stuff that was posted to that newsgroup you could read,
but you could not contribute to it unless you were
one of the authorized entities that could post from mailing
lists to that hierarchy. Then, as for the mod hierarchy,
that was for newsgroups that needed to be a bit
more controlled and buttoned up, because it was pretty clear
(22:20):
that as more students started to use Usenet, the tendency
to do goofy stuff like contributing off topic posts to
a thread or intentionally trying to start flame wars on
use net. That's really where that got started. These things would,
you know, derail conversations or sometimes completely pull focus from
(22:40):
whatever the topic at discussion was supposed to be. So
the mod hierarchy was moderated. That's what MOD stood for.
It was a moderated hierarchy. Every post under the mod
hierarchy would have to be approved by a moderator before
it was posted to. A newsgroup is often used for
(23:01):
stuff like official news and official announcements, that kind of
stuff where you didn't want the Hoi poloi to start
mucking everything up and confusing the message. So those were
your three You had your NET, your FA, and your
MOD and things would carry along that way until we
(23:21):
would get to the mid eighties. I'll explain more, but
first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors.
So we're up to the mid eighties. So remember us
NET kind of got start in seventy nine, really got
(23:44):
going in nineteen eighty. We get up to around nineteen
eighty six and into nineteen eighty seven, and a few
things happened that would shake things up for us NET
in a really significant way. For one, graduate students Phil
Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley and Brian Cantor
of University of California, San Diego wrote a Request for
(24:05):
Comments or RFC in nineteen eighty six in which they
described the specification for a new set of rules called
the Network News Transfer Protocol or in INTP. SO from
nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty six, the primary way
that you know, people were accessing use net was through
(24:27):
these time shared mini computer systems, So you didn't really
have access unless you had booked that time with the
mini computer, and as I said, that had really limited things.
NNTP made it more possible to access us net using
a microcomputer a personal computer, because by the mid eighties
(24:49):
these were now a thing that were capable enough to
be able to do something like that. So you would
be able to access read and post to use neet
groups by connectting your mini computer to whatever use net
server you happened to be able to access. So NNTP
(25:11):
is what made that all possible, and that would greatly
extend the access for use net, which meant also that
volume the posts on us net would increase dramatically as
a result. This then led to the Great Renaming, and
yes that's what it's referenced as the Great Renaming. It
gets a bit dramatic, but as I mentioned earlier, Steve Bellevan,
(25:33):
the guy who created the first use net client, imagine
that us net would see maybe one to two new
articles posted there per day, but us net was generating
way more than that by the mid nineteen eighties, and
the creation of n NTP would complicate matters because access
to us net would grow substantially, and so it was
becoming a bit of a mess, right, You just had
(25:55):
these three hierarchies that were trying to handle everything, and
the really the only differenterentiation between the hierarchies was that
the net hierarchy was essentially the one where anyone could
post content. The FA or FAW hierarchy was the one
that was just for posting content from mailing lists, and
the mod was for moderated posts, and that was it.
(26:16):
Everything had to fall into those, but it made it
really hard to organize and find stuff, like if you
were searching for something specific, it was hard to find. Now,
the use net network is decentralized, as I mentioned, but
Stephen Bellivan explained in those incredible posts that I talked
about on circleid dot com. They're well worth checking out.
(26:39):
Some of the nodes in this network held more sway
than others. They saw more traffic, and so the administrators
for those use net servers had a bit more power
than someone who's running a server that gets very little
traffic at all. And those nodes, along with some of
the folks who actually were responsible for building use net,
(27:00):
initially they became known as the backbone cabal. This became
like a long standing joke in usenet circles about whether
or not this cabal existed or didn't. But really, what
it just meant was that collectively they had the power
to decide what would or would not get wide distribution
(27:20):
across all of use Net. So let's say that there's
some sort of extraordinary circumstance that comes up and these
administrators collectively decide that those newsgroups are bad news, like
it's just it's dangerous or harmful or whatever you may think.
And it would have to be extraordinary for this to happen,
but it could happen. So collectively they decide that they're
(27:44):
not going to propagate that newsgroup. Well, that would limit
the circulation of that newsgroup. It wouldn't prevent it from existing.
It would still exist on whatever home server it was
posted to. It just wouldn't propagate to other use Net servers,
or at least not the big ones, which means means
it would limit the number of people who actually saw
and could interact with that post. So effectively, it could
(28:07):
be kind of like censoring that newsgroup. But again, this
didn't happen that frequently. It's just it was possible because
of the way usenet works. So this cabal debated and
discussed creating a new group of hierarchies that thet newsgroups
could inhabit to make things a little more manageable. This
in itself became a very long and detailed debate because
(28:31):
there are so many different ways you can classify information.
If you don't believe me, ask a librarian, Ask a
librarian about things like taxonomies and finding out like how
do you determine where does a book belong in? What
category should you put any one book? It gets really
(28:51):
complicated and subjective, So, for example, how would you classify
video games? Should you put it in like recreation or hobbies?
Or does it belong in technology or in business or
in programming. It kind of depends upon the point of view,
So some decisions would appear mostly arbitrary because when you
(29:11):
get down to it, they kind of were. So the
new big seven hierarchies that were created in this great
renaming were COMP for computer news, which is self explanatory,
REC for recreation, CIG for science sci, SoC for social sec,
TALK for general discussion, and MISK for miscellaneous. These were
(29:37):
not the only hierarchies, but these were the big ones,
the ones that had the most newsgroups under them. Then
you had alt which became the alternative hierarchy for newsgroups
that didn't really fit into the other ones, or that
were not being accepted into the other hierarchies. At least initially,
it was possible for a newsgroup to migrate to a
(29:58):
different hierarchy over enough time, but yeah, it was it
would make the organization a little wonky. So it again
extraordinary circumstances. The Big Seven in the nineties would depending
on whom you ask, would become the Big Eight because
there was a hierarchy called Humanities that joined the party
(30:18):
that some people would say kind of belongs with the
Big Seven. But honestly, there are hundreds of hierarchies. Some
of them are also pretty big, like biz biz. That's
a hierarchy dedicated to business newsgroups. It's a pretty happening
newsgroup or hierarchy, i should say. So there are lots
(30:40):
of them out there. Some of them just get very
specific to things like education, that kind of stuff. And
so numerous use net groups formed. Some of them flourished,
some of them failed. Some would become the backbone to
future web content. IMDb dot Com famously started off as
a use neet group before it became the Internet Movie database,
(31:03):
and I'm sure no one thought that it was going
to grow into something that would later get scooped up
by Amazon when it was still part of a use
net group. And usnet is still going on strong today.
There are news groups that are dead, but that's because
they were focusing on topics that are themselves obsolete. Today
it would be very strange to find a lively discussion
(31:25):
about like five and a quarter inch disk drives. Who
the heck is using them? Besides like very niche hobbyists,
use net is very different other types of Internet activity
as well. Use net does not track user behaviors, So
that's one major difference between using us net versus the web.
(31:46):
When you're on the web, everyone wants to track you, right,
There's so many different ways to track user behaviors and
user web history, and that information becomes valuable. That is
the currency of the Internet. That's what's being bought and
sold by data brokers. That's the stuff that is valuable
about you. You don't get to realize that value. You
(32:08):
are the product you are being bought and sold. And
that's just the way it is when you're using the web.
Use net though it doesn't track user behavior, so you
can subscribe to whichever use net groups you want. The
use net server isn't paying attention to who is doing what,
and so there's a lot more privacy in that regard
(32:29):
as to you know what you are actually consuming on
use net versus on the web. There are lots of
use net clients out there. There are a lot of
newsreaders out there that you can use. Some of them
are built into web browsers. There are also a lot
of use net service providers out there, some of which
have subscriptions that you have to pay in order to
(32:50):
access them, but it means that you can access that
particular provider and get advantages that you would over say
a smaller provider, like a really big provider will have
features that you won't find with smaller providers. One of
the things that net servers have is a retention policy.
(33:11):
That's how long they will hold a file before deleting it.
So you know, if you find one that has a
retention policy of a thousand days or more, that's pretty good.
I think I saw one that had more than five
thousand days retention policy, and that means you'll have access
(33:32):
to the most files that you can, because ultimately, as
time passes, they will get deleted off use net. So
depending on which provider you're using to connect to use net,
you will have access to certain user generated content. If
you're on a different provider, they might delete files more frequently,
(33:55):
you're not going to get access to them. There's also
like limitations to things like how much you can pull
down per month for some providers. Some of them offer
unlimited plans that kind of thing. So there's a lot
of variety when it comes to the actual providers out there.
But yeah, that's kind of the lowdown on us net.
What's interesting to me is that, again I have read
(34:17):
things that suggested that millennials and Gen Z users are
kind of migrating over to us net more and more,
which is news to me. I think that's really interesting,
and especially since like I associate use net with an
old method of accessing the Internet. And for the record,
I had access to use net a little bit in
(34:39):
my youth and my college years and everything, but truth
be told, I kind of went from BBS's bulletin board systems,
which are you know, that's where you're logging into a
local computer or a single computer not a network, and
you're getting you're posting and retrieving information to that compute,
(35:00):
and you're not networked into a larger system. I went
from that to telnet, and from tel net I went
to the World Wide Web. So I didn't use us
net that much when I was in college, which was
in the early nineties, so this was mostly me learning
about it because I had only had limited access to usnet.
(35:22):
I did hear about it quite a bit, like you
would always hear about the various alt news groups that
were catering to some rather varied interests. I will say,
but I never frequented them because I was more too
busy tell netting into chat rooms and chatting with people
(35:43):
in other colleges just for the heck of it. So
that's it. That's our little overview of what us net is.
I almost said was, but it really is still a thing.
I hope you are all well, and I will talk
to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
(36:08):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey Thearin,
Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech are
you today? I thought we'd talked about something that's both
a throwback and it's still very much current, which is
(00:26):
the networked communication system called us net. While I think
just about everyone is familiar with certain Internet related services,
you know, like email or web browsing, maybe to a
lesser extent, things like FTP, that sort of thingt I
think depends on the person. Some of you may have
(00:47):
only heard or seen references to UNT, some of you
may never have heard of it at all, And of
course I think some of you are probably very familiar
with it. In fact, from what I understand you, SET
is actually kind of experiencing some lot of a renaissance
among younger users like millennial and gen Z users. I
(01:07):
would not know. I'm gen X, so I'm out of
the loop everywhere. We're not even included in those articles
that are about all the different generations and how they
differ from each other. Gen X is always left out
of that, so I don't know what's going on with
my own generation. But I'm getting off track. So usenet
(01:27):
is older than the Web. When Tim berners Lee introduced
the technology that would underlie the Worldwide Web in the
early nineties, Usenet had already been a thing for more
than a decade at that point. So our story begins
in North Carolina, primarily at Duke University. You had a
couple of graduate students at Duke named Jim Ellis and
(01:51):
Tom Truscott, and they were experimenting. They were creating a protocol.
And remember, a protocol is a set of rules, a
set of instructions that a computer follows, and the protocols
define how computers do certain tasks. They were working on
one called Unix to Unix Copy Protocol or UUCP. Now,
(02:15):
you also had a student at the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill named Stephen Bellevian who would create software
that would leverage this protocol and allow people to interface
with it. He would become very important in the creation
of us neet. In fact, also he ended up writing
(02:36):
several articles about the history of us net that were
incredibly useful when I was putting this piece together. He
wrote them for a circleid dot com, so you can
go there and read. I think it's a nine part
series where he goes into detail, sometimes great technical detail,
which I will not be doing for this episode. I
think it goes beyond the scope of what I want
(02:57):
to do. Plus I'd be more likely to mess things
up than to save them correctly. Anyway, this protocol made
it possible for different computers to exchange files and messages
if they were networked to one another. And by computers
I'm really talking about like mainframes and mini computers at
this point, primarily mini computers. Now, a mini computer is
(03:21):
not the same thing as a desktop or a laptop.
Those would be micro computers. A mini computer was still
a big old honkin computer system, like back in the seventies.
So a mainframe could potentially take up an entire room
or sometimes even an entire floor of a building. That's
how big mainframe computers could be. A mini computer might
(03:43):
be as small quote unquote as the size of an
entire desk or maybe a couple of refrigerators. These machines
often had pretty significant computing power for the time, but
they were not nearly as powerful as mainframes, or did
they have the capacity to process as much information per
(04:05):
unit of time as a mainframe could. They were, however,
marginally not marginally, they were significantly less expensive than mainframes,
so they became a core component of computer science departments
of various you know, schools that were specifically centered around technology.
One of those mini computers was the PDP eleven from
(04:26):
DC and it could run the Unix operating system. So
you know, there's lots of different opring systems out there.
Unix is one of the big ones, often used in
things like like web servers and things of that nature.
Unix and Linux, whereas you know, we're mostly familiar with
either Mac up Brain system or Windows, depending on the
(04:48):
type of machine you use. Anyway, the mini computer PDP
eleven was the sort of computer system that graduate students
had access to. This this was before many computers would
be powerful enough to do anything significant in the computing world.
Like they were great for hobbyists. They had lots of
(05:11):
useful tasks, but they were extremely limited. They would not
be useful in a research capacity for the most part.
So the students also had access to dial up modems,
which at that time ran at a blistering three hundred
bps that stands for bits per second, so the three
hundred bits per second is actually not blistering. That was
(05:33):
just a joke. Also, at this point, hardware displays were
really rare. Like computer minors, you just didn't really have
them in a lot of these systems. So for a
lot of these mini computers, you would not get your
results displayed on a screen. Instead, it would print on
a sheet of paper. So you would make some code
and then you would get a print out of results
(05:56):
and that would be when you'd find out whether or
not your code was good. If it wasn't, it had
to go back and fix it and then print out again.
It was pretty wild stuff back in those days. Well,
it gets even better than that. The original use net
network relied on acoustic coupler modems. So this is the
kind of modem that, as the name implies, uses sound
(06:19):
acoustics to make connections between computers. So each computer would
have a modem that would have a coupler, and the
coupler would hold a handset of a landline telephone, so
you would take the telephone out of its cradle. You
would put the telephone into the coupler the right way,
so that the microphones on one side, the speakers on
(06:40):
the other. You would then dial the number of the
computer system that you were hoping to connect to, which
also would have a handset and a coupler, and then
your computer would make noises indicating either a zero or
a one, so bits in other words, through the coupler,
and these noise would travel over the phone lines, just
(07:02):
as voice communication would if two people were just talking
on the phone. So the motive on the other end
would receive these noises and the coupler would convert them
into voltage signals that the computer would then interpret as
bits as zeros are wants, and you could have communication
between computers this way. Now, the reason why the students
went with this specific method wasn't because that's the only
(07:23):
technology they had access to. Instead, it was because they
were trying to get around some pretty tough regulatory hurdles.
Back in those days, AT and T essentially had a
monopoly over phone communications within the United States, so this
approach helped sidestep some obstacles they would otherwise have faced
when trying to connect the systems together. Right because you're
(07:46):
doing a voice call rather than a data call, at
least as far as the telephone system is concerned. It's
just sending signals of sound across You're not using it
as a data connection per se. And so it was
a way to kind of sidestep the very steep prices
you would have to pay in order to have a
(08:08):
data connection. So, by the way, AT and T tried
desperately to fight that and to make it so that
they could still charge enormous amounts of money for those connections,
but ultimately they lost that particular court battle. Anyway, Stephen
Bellvan wrote software to create a sort of client, kind
of like a web browser. It was a client that
(08:30):
would serve as the interface for use net and the
UUCP protocol, which I know, I just was repetitive. It's
like saying ATM machine. And also the computer systems and
modems were all doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes
and stalling the software on different mini computers made it
possible to exchange information and files between these mini computers INI,
(08:55):
not A and Y. In fact, there were not very
many computers connected to use net at all initially, so
they called it use net, which is short for Users Network.
The first three computers connected to the network were in
Duke University Duke Medical School and the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill. Obviously it would grow from there. But
(09:18):
we're gonna have to really sit down and explain what
use net is and a bit about how it's organized,
to really get an understanding of what makes it special.
So if you're at all familiar with Reddit, the description
of use net is going to sound a little bit
familiar to you on a surface level. So the use
(09:39):
net network consists of discussion groups. These are called newsgroups.
These would be a lot like subreddits on Reddit. So
each newsgroup is dedicated to a specific subject or topic.
Users can read and at least in most cases post
to newsgroups. There are limitations on that. I'll talk about
that in a bit. And you can subscribe to specific
(10:02):
newsgroups so that you can keep up with the new
stuff that's posted to them. At least you can do that. Now,
that's not how it worked initially, because originally the client
that Stephen Bellvan programmed was limited to updating the information
based on the last time you access the newsgroup according
to the computer's logs, and it would give you all
(10:24):
the updates, so you couldn't just jump around and grab
just the stuff you were interested in in the one
newsgroup that you were Let's say that you are just
absolutely fascinated with Dudgeons and dragons, and that's the only
newsgroup you wanted to be part of, so that was
all you were focusing on. Well, with Bellevan's client, you
would get everything, not just that newsgroup. The reason for
(10:46):
this is that Bellvan felt that usenet wouldn't get that
much traffic. He thought maybe it would generate an article
or two per day, people would write a piece for
use net, or maybe you would get two pieces in
a day, and so it'd be a very small update
each day. So there's no reason to worry about it
because he was you know, at the time, we were
(11:06):
talking about three computers, and again there were many computers.
They were ones that you had to have access to
as a student to be able to even use in
the first place, so by by definition, it was limited.
Plus this is a you know, a newsgroup you would
only have access to if you had booked time with
that mini computer, which was a process. Right, you had
(11:28):
to access it, and that required you to sign up,
and you know, sometimes you had a log book and
everything so that you could have access to it so
that other students would know that at that time you
were accessing the computer system. Anyway, we're gonna take a
quick break. When we come back, I'll talk a little
bit more about some interesting comparison's contrasts with Reddit. Okay,
(11:59):
we're so. Reddit tends to be a place where users
share links to interesting stuff to a relevant subreddit reddit,
and then conversation will flow from there. So a fairly
typical Reddit post might have a headline associated with a
news story, and you could click through and that will
(12:19):
actually take you to the news story itself, or you
can click into the messages and read the conversation around
the news item. But I mean, you could just have
a Reddit post that just is an original piece, a
user generated piece. Maybe it includes a photo or a
gift or something like that. But that's typically the way
reddits work, especially in the subreds I go to. Those
(12:40):
are almost always about sharing articles and links to interesting stuff. Well,
us neet was just originally limited to plain old text.
There was no Worldwide Web yet, so you couldn't hyperlink
to a web page. Web pages didn't exist initially, you
couldn't upload a file to use net Folks did see
(13:01):
that would be really useful if you could do that,
if you could create a way to upload and download
files to and from us net, but it would require
a bit of work in order to make this possible.
As such, students started to work on a way to
allow for the uploading and downloading of binary files. So
binary refers to basic computer language. You know, it's zeros
(13:23):
and ones. Those zeros and ones can represent anything, you know.
We're talking everything from software to orchestral symphonies to the
dancing baby gif that was all the rage on the
internet thanks to Ali mcbeil man. I'm dating myself with
this episode. So these smarty pants students came up with
a way to encode binary data into text because that's
(13:48):
what us net could handle. It could handle text. So
you would take your program. You would then have to
convert your program into binary code. You would have to
convert the binary code into text and then upload that.
Someone else could then grab that thread of posts and
then use a decoder to decode the text back into binary,
(14:12):
and then finally convert the binary into whatever the original
file format was. So there are a lot of steps,
but it would work. But there was a catch because
used that articles have a limit as to how much
data they can hold. So typically uploading a file means
that the file is going to be split across multiple posts,
and by multiple I mean potentially lots of posts, because
(14:36):
if you're trying to download something significantly large, like today,
if you were trying to download a high resolution video,
you could be talking about thousands of posts that make
up this video. So part of the issue was that
early encoding methods would inflate the file size significantly, by
like forty percent, so the file would get even larger
because of the encoding method Now, fortunately, folks would come
(14:58):
up with alternatives and they would find ways to encode
the binary into texts that would reduce that overhead. Also,
keep in mind that when us net was a new thing,
the folks who were using it were relying on those
dial up modems. They had really hefty limitations and how
much data they could download per second, so we weren't
typically talking about big files at least in the early
(15:19):
days of use net. Anyway, the support for binary files
meant that us neet would become a way to communicate
not just through text, but through files as well. This
is as you might imagine that led to some issues
with piracy, but well that's a matter for another episode,
so we're just going to move on and keep on
talking about us net. So a fundamental feature of us
(15:39):
net is that it's not a centralized service. This is
another way we can contrast it with Reddit. While Reddit
has some surface level similarities to us net, beneath the
hood things are very different. So Reddit is essentially centralized.
It means that the service ultimately runs on servers that
Reddit either owns or leases from, like a cloud competing
(16:03):
provider such as Amazon Web Services. But the point is
the underlying foundation for Reddit is in a centralized group
of servers. Centralized in this case doesn't necessarily mean geographically
by the way. That's because networking gets all whibbly wobbly,
but it does mean that's in this definite, finite number
of servers, and that is where Reddit lives. Use net,
(16:26):
on the other hand, is decentralized. Anyone could create a
use net server. You'd have to download the right software,
but you could do it. So the way use networks
is more like a peer to peer network. So let's
say you create a use net server. You connect your
server to the use net network at large, You indicate
(16:47):
which news groups in particular you want to prioritize on
your server, and your server will regularly ping other servers,
the bigger nodes in use Net's network to look for
updates to those newsgroups and thus pull in new information
whenever there is new information, and then your users on
your server can access that. Now, let's say that your
(17:09):
users on your server create a newsgroup that gets a
lot of popularity, and eventually other servers on the us
net network are interested in that newsgroup, so they start
pigging your server and they get updates on your user's
newsgroup and they serve it to their users. So the
whole network is decentralized and to an extent asynchronous. You
(17:32):
might access a newsgroup and read an article and some
of the posts beneath it, and then you decide you
want to write your own response, So you create your
own response and you send it to post. Now that's
going to go to whatever server you're connected to through usnet,
But that doesn't automatically populate across every use net server
(17:53):
that carries that newsgroup. That you have to wait for
them all to sort of synchronize, which means that they're
there's going to be a time where some versions of
that news group are going to have your reply, some
versions are not, and it means that other people might reply.
They might even make the same point you made. If
you're unlucky, they might make it better than you did,
(18:14):
and then you just seem to be, you know, repeating
what someone else said. But when you wrote your post,
you had that that reply didn't exist, or at least
you hadn't seen it yet because yours had not synchronized
with the most recent information. So it gets a little
bit like muddy when you're talking about, you know, what's
(18:34):
the latest information on us net. Well, it really depends
upon which server you're talking about and whether or not
that was the point where new material was generated or
if in fact it's waiting to be propagated across the
entire network. Now. One benefit of this approach is that
us net is somewhat shielded against censorship and interference because
(18:58):
there's no one to shut down it's distributed right now.
That doesn't mean that an authority cannot try, and even
in extreme cases, sometimes succeed to take stuff off us net.
But it ain't easy. It is a pretty tough thing
to do because there's not any one entity you can
(19:18):
go to like you can't. You could go to Reddit
and demand Reddit remove something, which you may or may
not work, depending on the nature of the thing, but
you can't really do that with us net because again,
it's not one single entity that controls use net. It's
it's a hive mind. The structure of newsgroups actually follows hierarchies,
(19:40):
and that is like large categorizations. Right today, you could
argue the most famous use net hierarchy is the ALT hierarchy,
which is funny because the ALT in this case stands
for alternative, specifically an alternative to the big seven newsgroup
hierarchies that are seen as the more establish but whatever,
(20:01):
that's not how everything started. There were no seven hierarchies
when use net first started. In fact, in the beginning,
there were only three hierarchies of newsgroups, and all that
was posted should fall under one of the three, and
it was adequate. So the three hierarchies were net, FA, FA,
(20:22):
and mod mod, So all newsgroups started with one of
those designations. So you might have one that says like
net dot discussion that would be a newsgroup. The net
hierarchy was pretty much the catch all. It started as
a hierarchy for newsgroups that were focusing on conversations about
the network itself, but that rapidly expanded to non network topics,
(20:47):
so you would get people creating like net dot politics
or net dot jokes. The FA hierarchy was an acronym
for from arpinnet. It got started after a student at
the University of California at Berkeley named Mark Horton joined
usenet in nineteen eighty and started to add material from
an arpinet mailing list to the network. Access to Arpinet
(21:10):
was really limited. It was very difficult to get access,
so what Horton was doing was kind of a service,
was providing other people the opportunity to read these mailing lists,
when otherwise they would not have any access to those
mailing lists. So arpinnet was sort of a predecessor to
the Internet. It was the network where computer scientists and
engineers were developing the rules that would allow for Internet communication.
(21:34):
So some people say, like, it's the grandfather of the
Internet if you think of it that way. I think
that's a little oversimplification, but it kind of gets the
idea across. So Horton's contributions would lead to a new
hierarchy dedicated to sharing information from Arbennet mailing lists, the
FA hierarchy, And originally that was a read only hierarchy,
(21:57):
so stuff that was posted to that newsgroup you could read,
but you could not contribute to it unless you were
one of the authorized entities that could post from mailing
lists to that hierarchy. Then, as for the mod hierarchy,
that was for newsgroups that needed to be a bit
more controlled and buttoned up, because it was pretty clear
(22:20):
that as more students started to use Usenet, the tendency
to do goofy stuff like contributing off topic posts to
a thread or intentionally trying to start flame wars on
use net. That's really where that got started. These things would,
you know, derail conversations or sometimes completely pull focus from
(22:40):
whatever the topic at discussion was supposed to be. So
the mod hierarchy was moderated. That's what MOD stood for.
It was a moderated hierarchy. Every post under the mod
hierarchy would have to be approved by a moderator before
it was posted to. A newsgroup is often used for
(23:01):
stuff like official news and official announcements, that kind of
stuff where you didn't want the Hoi poloi to start
mucking everything up and confusing the message. So those were
your three You had your NET, your FA, and your
MOD and things would carry along that way until we
(23:21):
would get to the mid eighties. I'll explain more, but
first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors.
So we're up to the mid eighties. So remember us
NET kind of got start in seventy nine, really got
(23:44):
going in nineteen eighty. We get up to around nineteen
eighty six and into nineteen eighty seven, and a few
things happened that would shake things up for us NET
in a really significant way. For one, graduate students Phil
Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley and Brian Cantor
of University of California, San Diego wrote a Request for
(24:05):
Comments or RFC in nineteen eighty six in which they
described the specification for a new set of rules called
the Network News Transfer Protocol or in INTP. SO from
nineteen seventy nine to nineteen eighty six, the primary way
that you know, people were accessing use net was through
(24:27):
these time shared mini computer systems, So you didn't really
have access unless you had booked that time with the
mini computer, and as I said, that had really limited things.
NNTP made it more possible to access us net using
a microcomputer a personal computer, because by the mid eighties
(24:49):
these were now a thing that were capable enough to
be able to do something like that. So you would
be able to access read and post to use neet
groups by connectting your mini computer to whatever use net
server you happened to be able to access. So NNTP
(25:11):
is what made that all possible, and that would greatly
extend the access for use net, which meant also that
volume the posts on us net would increase dramatically as
a result. This then led to the Great Renaming, and
yes that's what it's referenced as the Great Renaming. It
gets a bit dramatic, but as I mentioned earlier, Steve Bellevan,
(25:33):
the guy who created the first use net client, imagine
that us net would see maybe one to two new
articles posted there per day, but us net was generating
way more than that by the mid nineteen eighties, and
the creation of n NTP would complicate matters because access
to us net would grow substantially, and so it was
becoming a bit of a mess, right, You just had
(25:55):
these three hierarchies that were trying to handle everything, and
the really the only differenterentiation between the hierarchies was that
the net hierarchy was essentially the one where anyone could
post content. The FA or FAW hierarchy was the one
that was just for posting content from mailing lists, and
the mod was for moderated posts, and that was it.
(26:16):
Everything had to fall into those, but it made it
really hard to organize and find stuff, like if you
were searching for something specific, it was hard to find. Now,
the use net network is decentralized, as I mentioned, but
Stephen Bellivan explained in those incredible posts that I talked
about on circleid dot com. They're well worth checking out.
(26:39):
Some of the nodes in this network held more sway
than others. They saw more traffic, and so the administrators
for those use net servers had a bit more power
than someone who's running a server that gets very little
traffic at all. And those nodes, along with some of
the folks who actually were responsible for building use net,
(27:00):
initially they became known as the backbone cabal. This became
like a long standing joke in usenet circles about whether
or not this cabal existed or didn't. But really, what
it just meant was that collectively they had the power
to decide what would or would not get wide distribution
(27:20):
across all of use Net. So let's say that there's
some sort of extraordinary circumstance that comes up and these
administrators collectively decide that those newsgroups are bad news, like
it's just it's dangerous or harmful or whatever you may think.
And it would have to be extraordinary for this to happen,
but it could happen. So collectively they decide that they're
(27:44):
not going to propagate that newsgroup. Well, that would limit
the circulation of that newsgroup. It wouldn't prevent it from existing.
It would still exist on whatever home server it was
posted to. It just wouldn't propagate to other use Net servers,
or at least not the big ones, which means means
it would limit the number of people who actually saw
and could interact with that post. So effectively, it could
(28:07):
be kind of like censoring that newsgroup. But again, this
didn't happen that frequently. It's just it was possible because
of the way usenet works. So this cabal debated and
discussed creating a new group of hierarchies that thet newsgroups
could inhabit to make things a little more manageable. This
in itself became a very long and detailed debate because
(28:31):
there are so many different ways you can classify information.
If you don't believe me, ask a librarian, Ask a
librarian about things like taxonomies and finding out like how
do you determine where does a book belong in? What
category should you put any one book? It gets really
(28:51):
complicated and subjective, So, for example, how would you classify
video games? Should you put it in like recreation or hobbies?
Or does it belong in technology or in business or
in programming. It kind of depends upon the point of view,
So some decisions would appear mostly arbitrary because when you
(29:11):
get down to it, they kind of were. So the
new big seven hierarchies that were created in this great
renaming were COMP for computer news, which is self explanatory,
REC for recreation, CIG for science sci, SoC for social sec,
TALK for general discussion, and MISK for miscellaneous. These were
(29:37):
not the only hierarchies, but these were the big ones,
the ones that had the most newsgroups under them. Then
you had alt which became the alternative hierarchy for newsgroups
that didn't really fit into the other ones, or that
were not being accepted into the other hierarchies. At least initially,
it was possible for a newsgroup to migrate to a
(29:58):
different hierarchy over enough time, but yeah, it was it
would make the organization a little wonky. So it again
extraordinary circumstances. The Big Seven in the nineties would depending
on whom you ask, would become the Big Eight because
there was a hierarchy called Humanities that joined the party
(30:18):
that some people would say kind of belongs with the
Big Seven. But honestly, there are hundreds of hierarchies. Some
of them are also pretty big, like biz biz. That's
a hierarchy dedicated to business newsgroups. It's a pretty happening
newsgroup or hierarchy, i should say. So there are lots
(30:40):
of them out there. Some of them just get very
specific to things like education, that kind of stuff. And
so numerous use net groups formed. Some of them flourished,
some of them failed. Some would become the backbone to
future web content. IMDb dot Com famously started off as
a use neet group before it became the Internet Movie database,
(31:03):
and I'm sure no one thought that it was going
to grow into something that would later get scooped up
by Amazon when it was still part of a use
net group. And usnet is still going on strong today.
There are news groups that are dead, but that's because
they were focusing on topics that are themselves obsolete. Today
it would be very strange to find a lively discussion
(31:25):
about like five and a quarter inch disk drives. Who
the heck is using them? Besides like very niche hobbyists,
use net is very different other types of Internet activity
as well. Use net does not track user behaviors, So
that's one major difference between using us net versus the web.
(31:46):
When you're on the web, everyone wants to track you, right,
There's so many different ways to track user behaviors and
user web history, and that information becomes valuable. That is
the currency of the Internet. That's what's being bought and
sold by data brokers. That's the stuff that is valuable
about you. You don't get to realize that value. You
(32:08):
are the product you are being bought and sold. And
that's just the way it is when you're using the web.
Use net though it doesn't track user behavior, so you
can subscribe to whichever use net groups you want. The
use net server isn't paying attention to who is doing what,
and so there's a lot more privacy in that regard
(32:29):
as to you know what you are actually consuming on
use net versus on the web. There are lots of
use net clients out there. There are a lot of
newsreaders out there that you can use. Some of them
are built into web browsers. There are also a lot
of use net service providers out there, some of which
have subscriptions that you have to pay in order to
(32:50):
access them, but it means that you can access that
particular provider and get advantages that you would over say
a smaller provider, like a really big provider will have
features that you won't find with smaller providers. One of
the things that net servers have is a retention policy.
(33:11):
That's how long they will hold a file before deleting it.
So you know, if you find one that has a
retention policy of a thousand days or more, that's pretty good.
I think I saw one that had more than five
thousand days retention policy, and that means you'll have access
(33:32):
to the most files that you can, because ultimately, as
time passes, they will get deleted off use net. So
depending on which provider you're using to connect to use net,
you will have access to certain user generated content. If
you're on a different provider, they might delete files more frequently,
(33:55):
you're not going to get access to them. There's also
like limitations to things like how much you can pull
down per month for some providers. Some of them offer
unlimited plans that kind of thing. So there's a lot
of variety when it comes to the actual providers out there.
But yeah, that's kind of the lowdown on us net.
What's interesting to me is that, again I have read
(34:17):
things that suggested that millennials and Gen Z users are
kind of migrating over to us net more and more,
which is news to me. I think that's really interesting,
and especially since like I associate use net with an
old method of accessing the Internet. And for the record,
I had access to use net a little bit in
(34:39):
my youth and my college years and everything, but truth
be told, I kind of went from BBS's bulletin board systems,
which are you know, that's where you're logging into a
local computer or a single computer not a network, and
you're getting you're posting and retrieving information to that compute,
(35:00):
and you're not networked into a larger system. I went
from that to telnet, and from tel net I went
to the World Wide Web. So I didn't use us
net that much when I was in college, which was
in the early nineties, so this was mostly me learning
about it because I had only had limited access to usnet.
(35:22):
I did hear about it quite a bit, like you
would always hear about the various alt news groups that
were catering to some rather varied interests. I will say,
but I never frequented them because I was more too
busy tell netting into chat rooms and chatting with people
(35:43):
in other colleges just for the heck of it. So
that's it. That's our little overview of what us net is.
I almost said was, but it really is still a thing.
I hope you are all well, and I will talk
to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
(36:08):
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TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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