This article is really amazing and amusing to me, and not just because of the excitement back then over something like how "news groups produce about 4 million characters of new material a day, the equivalent of about five average books." The author, Barton Gellman, is also the reporter who is covering and breaking stories on the Snowden/NSA beat for the WaPo, including what I think is one of the most remarkable technical stories about it so far ("Fuck these guys" -- <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...</a>). It's funny to me because I've heard Gellman and his partner describe him as not being very tech savvy at all...So even if his current NSA pieces don't go into the finer technical detail, it's still impressive that in 1988, he was able to grok enough of the Internet back then to capture some of its best and most profoundly gamechanging aspects of the Internet...in ways that journalists even today still don't quite appreciate:<p>> <i>Jerry Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, needed engineering data on the massive Keck Telescope under construction in Hawaii that specified precisely the shape of its reflecting mirror. Stoll, the Harvard astronomer, transmitted the file within two minutes to Nelson's computer.</i>...<p><i>There is more to life than science, and the network publishes hundreds of special-interest forums known as news groups. They have no exact counterpart in traditional media, but seem to combine most of the functions of hobby magazines, radio talk shows, classified advertisements and singles bars.</i><p><i>"It's like being able to subscribe to any magazine instantly, read back issues, contribute to it as an author and unsubscribe whenever you want -- all at no cost," said Kenneth R. van Wyk, a senior consultant in user services at Lehigh University's computer center.</i>