On 12/20/11 1:18 PM, Paul W. Schleck wrote:

What's fascinating is the economy of words in these old articles, mostly
no more than a paragraph or two, that still convey a lot of useful
information. Now, I'm sure that part of this is due to the limitations
of communications capacity and data entry schemes in affordable
computers of that era (glass or even paper TTY's, transfer of data on
low-capacity floppy disks, etc.), but some of it is certainly also our
historic training and inculturation as radio operators to be clear,
brief, and to the point. I think that we can still learn from these
early examples of "on-line" interaction.

I spent some time reviewing net.general, which at that point in time was
low enough volume that everyone was expected to read it. In general the
same economy of words is true, tho there's some complaining that
excessive volume wastes precious bandwidth. One image file attached to
one email in today's world would probably be more bytes than a month's
worth of Usenet back then, but people were actually paying long-distance
charges to make it happen.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be anything new on the server
now. Maybe this is due to a gap in the data that he's "re-playing" or
maybe it's a symptom of something more serious.

It sure is a different world today than it was 30 years ago, in many ways.

73, Steve KB9X