[dsr_]

In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks. At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe).

So if you want Usenet, right now, every $5/month minimal VM that I'm aware of has more than enough CPU, RAM, disk and I/O to support you and two dozen friends, as long as you don't take binaries froups.

[throw0101a]

> At times Usenet ate most of a T1 (that's a 1.5Mb/s pipe).

How much of that was due to alt.binaries.*?

[readingnews]

All of it. Like 90something percent of it. And I think you meant to say alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.*

I was the sysadmin at an ISP in the 90s also. We spent the majority of our time talking about that NNTP server. Is it worth it? How do get purchase more disk when the SCSI bus is full and disks are crazy expensive? How do we get more CPU? How do we keep the load down at sync time? I think we spent more time talking about that than playing doom.

Still, Horny Robs BBS files were all on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hornyrob (or something like that) and well, that kept a LOT of customers happy, so we keep that pile of servers running.

[indymike]

> How much of that was due to alt.binaries.?

Most ISPs stopped carrying .binaries.* groups because of this.

[commandlinefan]

I wonder how expensive it would be with today’s disk prices - I can’t imagine binaries.* have grown that much in size themselves.

[dsr_]

They got much, much bigger. HD video.

[jeremyjh]

My first thought too! Probably 99%.

[Narishma]

> In 1996, my local ISP ran Usenet on the beefiest PC-platform machine I had ever seen: a dual Pentium-II 400 with 128MB of RAM and 6 9GB SCSI disks.

That's a feat, considering the Pentium II wasn't released until 1997, and the 400 MHz version late 1998.

[dsr_]

That might have been the successor, then. You'll forgive my memory at this range.