Usenet Archeology

trn usenet client (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This might be of interest for at least some people:

I recently came across http://olduse.net/ which is a historical exhibit.

It posts Usenet posts as they were posted exactly 30 years ago. The whole thing is also available as nntp.olduse.net, emulating the this time as a real time news server.

The interesting thing for me here is the roleplaying group: net.games.frp (yes, it emulates the group structure before the great renaming as well).

What we have here is, basically, the first internet forum about fantasy roleplaying.
Most of these things are of course available in the Google Groups archives (I guess at least. Google Groups is a terrible interface), but the server is nice for slowly reading the whole discussion along as it happens/happened, already with a lot of interesting topics, and a certain cuteness long before the big satanic panic.
Right now it slowly is picking up, it had some nice tables for AD&D posted on it, some people were discussing the merits of AD&D against other systems like C&S and RQ, and other people were asking confused questions what the hell the abbreviations C&S and RQ actually meant. Meanwhile in net.sf-lovers someone had to ask what LOTR stood for, and another person was looking forward to new Xanth books. Right now it’s September 3rd, 1982 on the server, and it feels weird, and a bit exciting to read the whole thing. Like time travel, just without the touching and killing grandfathers.

Related articles

• Usenet – what have you become? (90percentofeverything.com)
• Usenet: it’s time to put a stake in it (notes.kateva.org)
• NewsDemon.com Newsgroups Celebrates the Thirtieth Anniversary of USENET (prweb.com)

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