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Ten years on usenet
It is ten years ago today since I posted my first usenet message.
I've been here since the days when usenet was almost exclusively for universities and high-tech firms, when my company was unusual for using email, and even techies didn't know what the www in certain URLs stood for. Back then the accepted wisdom was no-one could archive every news posting, but even then the pre-curser to the pre-curser of google was saving them. I can't tell you what the web was like, because it was still being invented. I'd found newsgroups, not by using a newsreader, but by looking at different files on the computer system of my new job, and wondering just what were these files with names like /var/spool/news/misc/kids/1546. (Worth noting that the employees of this company were expected to do this sort of thing: anyone who would only use the proper software to look at a file would not have a job there.) My first post was about vi, the unix text editor, which I still use by choice. I didn't post to misc.kids until December that year, when I was pregnant. Back then, mk was the only group for pregnancy, breastfeeding and childcare. The posters on mk really influenced my parenting. For instance, I knew "breast was best" and I like the idea of exclusive breastfeeding, but I thought it wasn't something ordinary mothers like me could do. But there *were* ordinary women in mk who had done it, so I learnt I might be able to. And I did. The biggest thing I learnt was that every child is different, and I was given the confidence to trust myself, not the experts who had written books.I hope I've been able to help other, newer parents just like I was helped myself. I've got the t-shirt (my yougest still just fits into her "I'm a misc.kid" one), and a photoalbum, even a fridge magnet. The great thing about mk is it survives and adapts. It is a different newsgroup now to what it was them, but thriving in a different way. It has gone downhill at least twice, sufficiently badly for me to either unsubscribe, or nearly unsubscribe. And both times it has re-vitalised itself. I love it for being so open: it wants new people to come along and wants to adapt to them. I hope it continues to adapt, continues to be aviable newsgroup. At one particularly low spot for mk, I got involved in the creation team for mkm - a group that has developed into yet another different newsgroup. I'm very proud of what I helped to create (although it is the moderators who are doing the hard part now: merely creating it was relatively easy.) So, I suppose I'm an old-timer now (but to me old-timers were around before the "great renaming", not before "the endless September"). I just hope I don't start saying "in my day, things were better", I hope I continue to see that people who have only just started on the internet may have good ideas and ways of doing things that are better then the old ways. And I hope I'm still on usenet to post my twentieth anniversary message. -- Penny Gaines UK mum to three PS This is the nth time I've tried to send it, so I hope you don't see too many copies |
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Ten years on usenet
I have been on groups and lists and stuff for about 10 years. I don't have a
record of the first time, though. I have definitely been on newsgroups at least 7 years. Jeff |
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