2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

Re:2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone... by m463 on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @12:37AM (#24773120)

If you feel old, I once located some posts of mine from the 80's when names started with net.* and everything was bangpaths like foo!bar!bletch

hmm... here's a taste of it:

https://slashdot.org/story/00/08/27/1439247/usenet-archive-f...

EDIT:

Great Renaming: n.

The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. “The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources.” There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/Great-Renaming.html

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Re:2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone... by watersb on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @03:10PM (#24780342)

Friend at Yale was a bang-path email relay in 1987. Can't remember the structure, the actual address or how it worked.

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Re:2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone... by markedathome on Thursday October 15, 2020 @04:45AM (#24786289)

hu hum...digs out "Managing UUCP and Usenet" by Tim O'Reilly and Grace Todino, revised 1994.

p293 " ! Should only be used when sending via UUCP. This should be the only special character in the address (called a path). The path indicates each site through which mail will be routed, starting at the left and going towards the right. Mixing ! with @ is not considered good. That is, use:

uunet!ucbvax.berkeley.edu.edu!smith

not:

[email protected]"

In other words because UUCP was dialup and long distance expensive, email was routed through specific known hosts, which is why sometimes people ended up with long bangpathed addresses.

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