There is a probably-'80s document that I would like to find again, written I think by some university as an ‘introduction to Usenet’ for students. It had a section I particularly remember about focusing discussions on the <i>topic</i> of a newsgroup rather than on the <i>newsgroup</i>. Anyone recognize this?<p>(Today is Tuesday the 11389th of September 1993.)
the section "conclusion" is a good summary of the article, of major usenet design decisions and also of it's shortcomings.<p>It seems it has ~~degenerated~~ evolved to a niche file sharing platform for obscure contents?<p>I remember the days when comp.os.linux.announce was a good place to keep a pulse on what's cooking in terms of fun FOSS software.
"Personally owned computers—microcomputers, in the terminology of the day—were rare and were the domain of a few
hobbyists. Most were very small and generally lacked hard drives;
bulk storage was via audio cassette tape or (for the lucky few) on
floppy disks with a capacity of about 1.5 megabytes."<p>1.5 megabytes? Um, no. 3.5" floppies weren't out yet in 1979, and they were 1.44MB. 5.25" double-sided high-density floppies were 1.2MB, and I'm not sure they were were out yet either. I was using 8" floppies in 1979, and IIRC they were about 250KB