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I think there's some rose-coloured reviewing going on here. > It was fast [...] easy [...] you were in control [etc.] Not that I recall. It was slow, and could take from hours (local organisation or same city) to days (rest of the world) for an article to be propagated on Usenet. Yes, it was all cached locally, but often systems would download new articles only once a day, often at night when bandwidth (scarce and expensive, costing 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' as the rn warning went) was available. Conversations didn't take place in anything near real-time, but over days. It didn't have history, or archives, either. Binary newsgroups would be kept for days only (due to their size) while the 'alt' hierarchy was kept for longer and the 'big 7' longest (eventually multiple years, but originally only months, causing the loss of many early Usenet postings that were never archived.) As for moderation and accountability, moderated newsgroups were controlled by people who could choose whether or not to accept articles, and the creation of a new group, even in the 'alt' hierarchy was at the whim of some news administrator, while the 'big 7' required the 'Usenet Cabal' to agree, after a voting process that while democratic was complex and confusing. Actually getting access to a group required your local news administrator to decide whether it was worth the disk space and bandwidth, so there was no guarantee that you would see every group or message. As for full-text search over the entire newsfeed, Kibo was famous for this because it was rare. Searching news was difficult and time and compute resource hungry; most people did not have the resources to accomplish this. The Web is a "version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people" plus interactivity, colour, images, video, hypertext, programmable extensibility, you name it... |