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HardeeHo's avatar

Ah the days of flame wars on Usenet. Some pretty funny others not so much. And the era of shove out posts where the poster flooded servers with nonsense back in the day of limited storage space. Won’t work today with binaries exceeding 3 years retention. But few even know of Usenet discussion groups where we helped build the RFC’s that allow interoperability. BTW still there.

But Http social media allows even fools to participate. Usenet required some skill. So we get shoved about by a clueless minority but very vocal. Abuse is rampant so normal folk become isolated. I quit the WaPo comments because of leftist tirades at any opposition. Getting berated isn’t pleasant nor is getting kicked from certain media because masks never worked nor does the vaccine help much. Now those views are mainstream but not welcome earlier.

Finding SubStack has been helpful in restoring my balance leaving other platforms has been useful.

Your insights are valuable even when we can politely disagree. The tone mostly civil.

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Justin's avatar

I still remember alt.wesley.die.die.die which was created becaues people were tired of the Wesley Crusher know-it-all-teenage-pilot on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Ah, those were the days of TRUE conservation, where we did everything in 7 bits. Couldn't share 8 bit graphics...

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HardeeHo's avatar

Well we did various encoding tricks for 8 bits. In the beginning there were no standards so decoding was hit or miss. Today there are even better coding so the coding overhead on binaries was lower. Just via UUTP avoiding certain codes remains. Not sure why anymore.

The real trick was a certain skill no longer needed. Your angry Joe can now just let loose into a faceless void.

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