Bob Browning's blog

I was looking at the page telling you about Moving to Python from other languages and it referenced “comp.lang.python” without any explanation of what it was. That took me back. It is referring to a Usenet News Group. They were the first social media dating back to the 1980s. This was before Facebook, before Reddit, before online forums, before the World Wide Web. I thought they were long gone. But no – they are still alive and well.

To understand how they used to work you have to think of a world in which there is no world wide web, but there was email and you could copy files over the network. It’s hard to visualise I know, but there was a time like this. Access to the Internet was slow. A line to a large office complex might be a T1 operating at 1.544 Mbps – this is for the whole building. Lesser mortals had a modem that used a regular phone line and if you were lucky achieved 2,400 bits/second.

The Usenet system was built around this world. Groups could be set up for any subject and users could post to groups and create threads on a particular topic. But how was this achieved without a web browser in sight?

You kept posts for the groups you were interested in on your computer. Whenever you loaded the Usenet client on your computer (called a Newsreader) it downloaded any new posts to keep you up to date. That way you could search and browse posts quickly and only had to wait for a full set of posts when you started a new subject. That could take a while but it was once-off. There was no central server. The database was distributed between servers run by universities and ISPs.

Usenet still exists, but has changed over the years. In it’s original format, it was a free service used to exchange papers and opinions in academia. Numbers were limited and everyone understood norms for using it. Each September a tranche of new students began to use the system and veteran users disliked the intrusion of these undisciplined new users. Then in 1993-94, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) made Usenet available to general users, and a flood of new users came in. As you can imagine, this did not please long-time users who referred to this period as the Eternal September.

In the mid 90’s the World Wide started to become available. and Web-based forums started to get established. They are much more user-friendly than Usenet which gradually dropped out of use for most users. But it didn’t go away. Now it is a paid-for service to exchange large data files.

Users still use traditional newsreaders, although there are web-based Usenet sites. These look and feel a lot like normal forum sites. The most well-known is Google Groups, which is free but neglected. Another is EasyNews, but that is a paid service.

So this antique technology is still there, still being developed and repurposed for a different purpose. Maybe there is a role for the horse-drawn carriage.