Okay, so someone asked me about Usenet the other day - and I waxed nostalgic on what it used to be. In my mind, that’s still what it is. CJ (AKA Bahumatneo) was a little disappointed in me…

I am an avid watcher of your videos on YouTube and I was kinda disappointed in the video about Usenet. Not about anything you said — it was very informative — but about the fact that you left any information about what it has become out.

I will admit that I download certain material from time to time — the time being every few seconds — but the phrase still applies. I started on LimeWire where I was constently annoyed at the speeds, the cutoff times, and that many files just seemed only to exist in name only. Why show the link if the file is unavailable? I later heard about torrents and became an avid user of them. I still love torrents (although the speed is kinda annoying) for the fact that they always work; and you can find almost anything using them.

When I heard about newsgroups, I looked into it immediately. It turned out that while I was only downloading at 22-200kb\s with torrents, I was downloading at over 1mb\s with newsgroups. My jaw dropped. The binaries found on newsgroups have been the main way I get my files of any data type since then, and with the addition of QuickPar, I have never been happier. I consistently download at the fastest speed that my Internet connection will allow.

Sorry about the rant! Keep up the great videos — they are extremely entertaining and informative.

Even back then, I remember running the uuencode and uudecode utilities from my University VMS and Unix accounts. :) I could never handle MIME encoding easily, and now I guess everyone relies on Yenc over all others? Regardless, Usenet was better policed by the community back then - and most of the files to be found were legal, photos, and/or unregistered shareware. At least, in the newsgroups I frequented!

[tags]newsgroups, usenet[/tags]