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Posted by Tim Smith on 01/30/07 02:58
In article <JCnDvq.1KK5@wjv.com>, bv@wjv.com (Bill Vermillion) wrote:
> In article <rnntq21sbpteo5aofqpo7o8v3er9c46tkg@4ax.com>,
> MassiveProng <MasiveProng@yourhiney.org> wrote:
> >Some dipshit wrote:
> >
> >>> IIRC, before around 1985, people tended to top post. It makes
> >>> reading a thread much easier when you are stuck with a s-l-o-w text-
> >>> mode newsreader on a s-l-o-w connection - which is pretty much all
> >>> there was back then.
>
> > No. One DOWNLOADS posts, then reads, dumbass (at least if you have
> >half a brain). ANY of you idiots that actually tried to read as it
> >downloaded were even more stupid that the top postingf twits with
> >their top posted twit mentalities.
>
> Not always true. One of our first local feeds was running
> on a MicroVAX - and you could read as they scrolled, or mark
> the messages and save them there, and then download them if you
> wanted to archive them. But that was in the days when 1200 bps
> was about the top speed and it was fairly easy to read at that
> speed.
Also, keep in mind that in 1985, usenet propagation was quite a bit
different. It was a peer-to-peer system, and most of the peer links
were UUCP connections over dial-up, and often they were not on demand.
For example, one of the major links between Southern California and
Silicon Valley then was a UUCP link between Callan Data Systems (where I
worked at the time), and...I forget who in Silicon Valley. This was a
dial-up that occurred once a day in the early morning, when phone rates
were cheap.
A usenet post could take several days or longer to propagate throughout
usenet. Someone reading your response to a post might have never seen
the original (sites often had short expire times, or the original might
not yet have arrived). Top posting was extremely annoying in such an
environment. The only style that worked well was to trim the original
down to just what is needed to make your comments make sense, and put
your comments right after the things they are in response to.
For all the youngsters reading this who are thinking "my God, that's
primitive", email was even worse back then. Here are my email addresses
from my usenet signature in late 1985:
ihnp4!cithep!tim
ima!ism780!ism780b!tim
Those are routes. That first one is saying that I was "tim" on cithep,
and that cithep had a connection to ihnp4. So, if you could find a
route that would get your mail to ihnp4, you could get it to me. The
second says that I was tim on ism780b, which was connected to ism780,
which was connection to ima.
ima and ihnp4 were well-known sites with high connectivity, so you'd
learn a route from your site to them. So if someone at, say, kremvax,
wanted to send me mail, they might know that kremvax talks to decvax,
and decvax talks to ihnp4, so they could address the mail this way:
decvax!ihnp4!cithep!tim
and it would reach me, eventually.
--
--Tim Smith
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