SMBlog — 14 November 2019

The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue

November 2019 is, as best I can recall, the 40th anniversary of the conception of Usenet. (What’s Usenet? The Wikipedia article is ok but not perfect.) I should have written a proper paper; instead, there will (probably) be an irregular series of blog posts. I’ll do Part I of N tonight.

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Here is the table of contents, actual and projected, for this series.

1. The Early History of Usenet: Prologue
2. The Technological Setting
3. Hardware and Economics
4. File Format
5. Implementation and User Experience
6. Authentication and Norms
7. The Public Announcement
8. Usenet Growth and B-news
9. The Great Renaming
10. Retrospective Thoughts
11. Errata

The tag URL https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/control/tag_index.html#TH_Usenet_history will always take you to an index of all blog posts on this topic.

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html