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by sbf501 1475 days ago
As another Member of the Society to Reduce Wesley into a Little Styrofoam Dodecahedron, I can certainly attest that usenet wasn't as gleamingly professional as we remember. The original stereotypes of discussion group users (trolls, white knights, etc.) came from usenet.
1 comments

don't forget porn, there was a tremendous amount of porn on usenet. a friend of mine had some perl script he called "aub" that scraped alt.user.binaries or something like that. catalogs and catalogs of stuff on a quiet little server in a university lab.
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica FTW

(There was also a computer at MIT called "zurich.ai.mit.edu" that you could FTP to in 1990 and download really raunchy NSFL porn. I still have scars.)