On Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 1:47:49 AM UTC-7, Rob wrote:
Paul W. Schleck wrote:

This is from a web-site that is replaying Usenet, and rec.ham-radio,
from 30 years ago (currently summer 1990). The site is:

http://www.olduse.net

If you prefer to use your own newsreader, the site also supports an NNTP
connection at:

nntp.olduse.net:119
I followed that for a while a couple of years ago, when it covered the
very early days of usenet where you could still read "everything" and
administrators were keeping the hardware of their PDP11 running using
erasers etc. That was very interesting!

What would these people who thought radio is becoming too complicated
because of all the semiconductors have thought when 25 years later
radio transformed from a hardware job into a software (SDR) job?? :-)

Unfortunately, Brian Kantor did not live to be 85 years old and become
as wild as his grandpa... :-(

I was searching for some of my old messages (for another project) and just had to reply...

30 years? Wow. I was just graduated UCLA (grad school) back then, and had started my first full time job in May.
I had also just received my ham radio license in April.

Los Angeles had started service on its first modern light rail line in June (the last of the "Red Cars" ran in 1961, and the
last of the "Yellow Cars" in 1963). You could hear the train drivers talking over the air with a police scanner; I put the frequency
(471.3375 MHz) in my sig. (I think it has since changed to something else...)

Even in those days, when the Internet wasn't generally publicly available, I was pretty well connected online. I had PeopleLink (Plink) and
Genie (and later, Delphi) accounts, various phone BBSs, a ham radio packet radio BBS account, and Usenet

Back then, Usenet was the go-to place for expert discussions. But Usenet was hard to access, outside of academia or certain large companies.
After several attempts, I finally got access to Usenet via the UCLA Computer Club. There were also mailing lists I subscribed to.

Things have certainly changed. Around 1995, the Internet/WWW became more accessible to the general public. Phone BBSs and the
big timesharing services started to take a back seat, and mostly disappeared around 2000. "Eternal September" and the spammers made
Usenet less desirable for people who wanted to have a decent discussion, and most of the action moved to dedicated discussion sites.
By the late 2000s, social media networks such as Myspace and Facebook started to attract users, and Usenet was more or less cast aside,
although a few groups remain busy.

It's been an interesting ride...