Usenet

Long, long ago, when transport was hard, and communication primitive, when SlashDot, blogs, wikis, facebook, and all that malarkey were not even dreamed of, there was Usenet...

Ah, Usenet! The flame wars, Godwin's law, newgroup battles, propagation delays, trn, C news, INN... And an enormous amount of extremely useful discussion and information that could be found nowhere else. I learnt a great deal from Usenet.

In passing, I have to mention the comp.lang.c FAQ, maintained by Steve Summit, and one of the best collaboratively produced documents I have ever come across. Eventually Steve published it as a book ("C Programming FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions", Addison-Wesley 1996, ISBN 0-201-84519-9), and I was delighted to find my own name in the acknowledgements list, along with Dennis Ritchie, Andrew Koenig, Bjarne Stroustrup, and other luminaries. (My contribution to the FAQ was small to the point of vanishing: I corrected a misplaced "either". So I didn't really deserve to be there, but still...)

I've grouped my postings together, mainly by the group they were originally posted to, but - for example - postings about qmail to comp.security.unix are collected here with the other comp.mail.* postings.