Re: lamers on IRC

[Thomas Lord <lord@basiscraft.com>]

> Uhm, "upstream host", is that another computer that receives
> to the same feed as you so thus gets your posts or what is it?


Example from real life.  In high school I interned at a dinky little
start-up that was a net-news edge node.   The system administrators
at that little company set up an internal net news host the same way
someone might bring in an old ping pong table - to improve the work
environment.

That company dialed out to a more established company down the
road that, as a regional industry courtesy, not only hosted its
own internal net news host but connected to even bigger fish
upstream and casually offered peering to local small companies.


>> Google used its economic power and social influence to first
>> centralize what was left of mainstream netnews and then to
>> kill it off.
> 
> Well, you can tune into nntp.aioe.org with Gnus this very
> instant and see how useful it is. But killed - no.

Yes, I am being a bit absolutist there.

I suppose to be a little more accurate I would say that they
killed it as a way of sharing groups that had developed into
widely used global connected social media (relative to the scales of its
day).

To be sure, the not-really-multi-media email-style message format
didn't exactly help sustain interested in net news.

-t