Clicking through at random and found this post asking for support for protesters in "Tian-An-Men Square": https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=789653

Here's a thread on the birth of Haskell in 1990.[1] Simon Peyton Jones was writing about GHC supporting parallelization, and the team lacking access to hardware that supports shared memory for testing:

  Good news: we are; we have a parallel implementation running on the
  GRIP multiprocessor, with absolute wall-clock speedup over the same
  programs running on a comparable uniprocessor (never to be taken 
  for granted!).  This has only recently sprung to life, so it will be
  a while before we can report proper results.

  Bad news: it only runs on GRIP at present, so that rather limits its
  distribution.  We have access to a Meiko transputer machine, but it
  is quite a lot harder to deal with a distributed memory architecture.  The
  compiler would port rather easily to a shared-memory multiprocessor,
  but we don't have access to one at present.

[1] https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=878480

Boy, do I miss usenet news. It was a bright, shining star of the internet. Nothing comparable rose to replace it after Google killed it.

Google was a part of it. But spam, and a lack of proper moderation was really the issue.

A bigger issue was that Google buried all the archives from the Usenet with it.

Spam was a constant issue, yes, like it is today. But you did at least have reasonable tools to minimize the impact of it.

> A bigger issue was that Google buried all the archives from the Usenet with it.

Indeed. Killing usenet was bad. Burying the archives was unforgivable.

Not sure what this is supposed to be, since it's a tiny fraction of the Usenet messages posted during that decade (less than 1%?). But it was nice at a quick glance to see some names I hadn't seen in 30 years.