[bengoodger]

I'm about a half hour into this, and listening to Marc talk about newsgroups brings strong pangs of nostalgia. These days I'm a bit of a greybeard (salt-n-pepper beard?) of web browsing, but I remember getting started in the late days of Netscape, as a teenage open source hacker discovering all the Netscape engineers sitting on the npm.* newsgroups.. how wild it was to be able to turn up there with a question about the browser you used every day and have someone working on it answer! Netscape didn't survive, but what a legacy.

[esprehn]

That world lived on for quite a while through different mediums. I remember joining the webkit IRC channel in the early days and being full of wonder that folks like Hyatt were just hanging out willing to chat with me and answer questions.

There's something really special about the community and openness of folks who work on web browsers. Maybe it traces it's way back to the newsgroups.

[tingletech]

What were the npm.* newsgroups? I don't remember that hierarchy. Where Netscape and Node contemporaneous?

[bengoodger]

netscape.public.mozilla.*

The hierarchy there was basically a reflection of the company's browser team org chart. You could find a group for every team working on the browser where many of them were having their regular technical conversations.

[codetrotter]

Just now I am realizing that Slack is a lot more like a Usenet client than it is like an IRC client.

I mean. It’s still very far from actually being NNTP, and it’s not decentralized like Usenet or anything like that.

But all this time I’ve been thinking of Slack as “better IRC, with images and links and threads”.

When really Slack is more like “fancy Usenet service with client that renders images and other attachments”. (Although on the protocol and server and client implementation level it is very different from NNTP.)

Well. At least we don’t have to inefficiently yEnc encode attachments nor to split attachments into a bunch of pieces with par2 files. So there’s that.

[nsguy]

node.js and Netscape are about 20 years apart ;) I also don't remember an npm. newsgroup hierarchy. As a teenager during that time I recall some binary newsgroups though :)

[dboreham]

There were netscape.xxx internal news groups.