there's probably some insane arsehole with nostalgia for the bang path era of Usenet https://www.complete.org/usenet-over-nncp/

@davidgerard I agree that Usenet's time has passed but when I first joined Mastodon it did remind me of my NNTP days. I wonder why they didn't name "NNCP" "NNTP 2.0".

@glennsills oh very much so. the best of Usenet and the best of early 2000s message board feudalism

@davidgerard Forget NNTP, I'm nostalgic for uucp over V.22bis modems these days! No room for large GIFs, never mind video. Web hadn't been invented yet. No advertising, no fucking new media oligarchs pwning the internet, just raw ASCII text files.

@cstross @davidgerard Also, you really appreciate your pirated MP3s/scanned Playboy centrefolds if you have to wait a few hours for them to download (at night, when your parents aren’t using the landline).

@acb @davidgerard Parents? Who said anything about *parents* being young enough to know what one of those new-fangled modulator-demodulator boxes is for?

@cstross @davidgerard They didn’t, though they needed the line to be open in case anyone called them. Hence taking the nightshift to hit the BBSes.

@acb @cstross @davidgerard I tried setting up a BBS on the home phone line once. Didn't last long, parents went nuts about the screeching sounds calling the house at all hours of day and night.

@jimbob @acb @cstross i just hammered the connection with Audiogalaxy 24/7

@cstross it is true that I picked up sxxy deth chyx like crazy on alt.gothic from 1995 on

now we have a usenet group, and we're all old and creaky with kids

@davidgerard the invite tree (and consequent accountability chain) that everyone seems to be so excited about on bsky is not a million miles away from the bofhnet/usenet2 concept of “soundness”. I was a little surprised that the fediverse didn’t seem to be able to handle it as smoothly, but then there’s no c*b*l and subsequently no coherent notion of soundness.

@davidgerard (Am I nostalgic for those days? Yes. Do I think the same system would cope well today? No….)

@doop and if there was it would start at eugen, and *well*

@davidgerard Am I dating myself to say that I’m the person who newgroup’ed alt.atheism in 1990 (under my maiden name)?

And though I listed my email using DNS syntax, that was a brand new thing at that company. We had been using bang paths just the year before.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.pagan/TIAlrwQ3JSw/vLOWNyCI_1cJ

@cstross @davidgerard don't forget the immense phone bills we had back in those times...

@cm @cstross ah this was Australia, where it was 25c for any call of up to 24 hours!

@bhawthorne i got an offer a few years ago to join the official remaining Cabal (I didn't take it up)

@davidgerard Hello! Nice!to!meet!you

@wendynather @davidgerard LOL - I was just thinking about that recently listening to all the brouhaha over mastdon’s double ‘@‘ being to hard to understand and thinking: “you have *no* idea”

@wendynather @davidgerard This is speaking as someone who used to install and run UUCP mail servers in remote branch offices for clients with dial-up 2400bps modems on SUN pizza boxes that dialed in periodically since they were long distance calls…

@erik @davidgerard AKA the good old days! I used to be able to read at 2400 baud so I could use cat instead of more 😉

@cstross @davidgerard
Until Cantor and Seagal came along, that is...

@ncweaver @cstross does nobody remember JJ asking everyone to send him a dollar in 1988

@doop @davidgerard I don't believe we ever did Usenet over UUCP, but we did do earth.li email over UUCP for a while.

@noodles @doop in 1988 Australia was still getting most of its usenet flown over by tape, we didn't join the proper internet until the following year

@wendynather @davidgerard Or going back even further, 300bps with an acoustic coupler and a paper terminal so you could just tear off the output and review it at your leisure sitting on the deck with a drink :-)

This is how I first learned about remote working watching my dad (and me going through company paper playing Adventure and Star Trek)

@erik @davidgerard Same!! And I fondly remember the acoustic coupler hanging up when you sneezed 😆

@wendynather @davidgerard Of course, in this context, ‘reviewing at your leisure’ means scribbling all of your code corrections on the paper and then going back and fixing things using ed (blech).

Still, better than punch cards

@davidgerard you just brought back memories of … debugging uucp dialup scripts. A nerd full employment program, that was.

@wendynather @erik @davidgerard in the 1970s, my father used to work for the National Bureau of Standards and would take home a hard copy terminal with an acoustic coupler. His "neat trick" was that he could dial in and successfully login by whistling.

@jonahstein @wendynather @davidgerard 😳 OK - now that’s talent!

@erik @wendynather @davidgerard It must have been all of maybe 110 baud.

@acb @cstross @davidgerard

You haven’t lived until you’ve waited to download a nude (non-animated) gif only to view it on an Apple IIc’s green monochrome display.

@jonhendry @acb @cstross @davidgerard
Which reminds me of the time I heard something described as "the sexiest new thing on a computer screen since non-square nipples".

@jonhendry @cstross @davidgerard Real pr0n comes from dot-matrix printers

@jonhendry @acb @cstross @davidgerard Oh what a life! 😂🤣

@jonhendry @acb @cstross @davidgerard Fine pixilated art: My mother-in-law has a needlepoint nude on her wall. Low Resolution! Minimal colors!

@davidgerard @ncweaver @cstross Was that the guy who spammed Usenet asking for college money?

@phlebas @ncweaver @cstross yeeeeep

@doop @davidgerard

Mmm. 'Soundness' turned out to be 'culture fit' but in tactical strides.

@doop @davidgerard

(Further mithering about actively celebrating the damage done by hero cultures and having to wade through the testosterone to even generate a post. Thankfully I found cures for both and I'm not going back. No.)

@JuliaRez @doop the trashcan of Californian ideology

@jonahstein @davidgerard @wendynather @erik Reminiscent of Cap'n Crunch !

@jonahstein @wendynather @erik @davidgerard It’s certainly possible to handshake old modems by whistling the right tone as things were simple FSK back then (which would probably make the other end send you a login prompt) but actually sending data would require the ability to whistle frequency shift keyed data with high accuracy at 300 bps which I don’t think anyone’s quite managed. Handshaking that way is still a neat trick, though.

@jonahstein @wendynather @erik @davidgerard was my standard work trick back in 80s when I was designing and testing modems. Especially as we did some extra funky shit during the v25-bis sequence to kickoff the encryption protocol.

@jonhendry @acb @cstross @davidgerard uudecode!

@davidgerard @ncweaver @cstross I remember that. Some of the replies he received were less than sympathetic.

@phlebas @ncweaver @cstross one or two

@m @wendynather @erik @davidgerard I was maybe 8-9 years old at the time so I don't know if he got beyond the handshake and whistled the actual password.

@cstross @davidgerard Is there any 2023 version of the Scarey Devil Monastery? I believe I still have a rubber chicken or two I could wave if needed…

@bigiain @cstross there's various scattered chats