Paul wrote:
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In Patty Winter writes:


In article ,
Bert wrote:

The "g" command will prompt you for a newsgroup; the "h" command will
display help, showing the various commands.

Oh, good heavens, I never thought to try keyboard commands on the
web interface!

Thanks, Bert, I have it now.


Patty


Yeah, I thought at first that it was an embedded Java applet, but it
appears to instead be a JavaScript application to emulate a glass TTY
"dumb" terminal running a plain-text screen newsreader.

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.


Ummm, no.

Posts were kept short and to the point mostly because in the early days
USENET was propagated by UUCP, which for those that don't remember,
was direct dial up, low speed, modem communications usually incurring
telephone long distance charges for the calls.

The long distance calls were usually batch queued for the middle of the night
when the telphone rates were lowest.

Verbose posts were not looked upon favorably and if a UUCP node persisted
in using up a lot of telephone time, they could find their node dropped
by those that had to pay the bills.



--
Jim Pennino

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