Re: lamers on IRC

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Thomas Lord wrote:

> 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.

Can you explain the terms host and upstream in this context?

A host is a computer connected to Usenet and upstream is where
the data has been already, i.e. the servers?

>>> 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.

I've heard the so called binary groups (which contained
multimedia) were part of the reason of the fall in popular use
since people were sharing files - so not the least XXX rated
movies - to the extent it ate up most of the bandwidth while
there still wasn't a monetary incentive to keep providing the
service, from the ISP's POV ...

-- 
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