Origins of this newsgroup in a nutshell

Thanks Max.

I'm glad you stopped well before Rosaphilia. :)

] Having seen the creation of some early newsgroups in the 1980s, I recently ] posted recollections of one of them (rec.food.cooking, originally net.cooks) ] by request of that site's FAQ keeper. That posting ("Origins of this ] newsgroup and other online food fora") can be found on rec.food.cooking ] [with undistorted internal Message-ID references], or archived, for example ] currently here: ] [snip interesting post]

Thanks for the history Max! Thought I'd mention that back in '87 or so when I first started lurking around usenet, the alt-dot hierarchy was known mostly for being disreputable. One well known electronic romance between an east coast employee of a certain workstation manufacturer, later bought by HP, and a west coast company known for oscilloscopes, began on alt.sex and was chronicalled (including off-group emails) by an unsavory postmaster at one of the afore-mentioned. When this made the rounds, we began to see some of the hidden potentials of the internet! :) Of course, this was all pre-web. When we moved to France in '90, few here had even heard of the internet; France telecom informed us that the worlds largest network was "transpac" and we had to hijack access through a chemistry professor friend's account at Jussieu. :/

Alt-dot has come along way from those heady days!

-E

"Emery Davis" in news: snipped-for-privacy@address.com... | Thanks for the history Max! ... in '87 or so when I first | started lurking around usenet, the alt-dot hierarchy was | known mostly for being disreputable.

"Was?" ;-) ;-) More below, but I'll follow your narrative flow.

You may then have witnessed the remarkable birth of the "alt." newsgroup hierarchy (after a dinner in May 87) via Brian Reid and associates. Reid's motivation for the new utterly unconstrained hierarchy concerned cooking (I reprised it here in June 04). alt.drugs appeared after much debate, then Reid's creation of alt.sex and his posting April 3, 1988:

"That meant that the alt network now carried alt.sex and alt.drugs. It was therefore artistically necessary to create alt.rock-n-roll, which I have also done. I have no idea what sort of traffic it will carry. If the bizzarroids take it over I will rmgroup it or moderate it; otherwise I will let it be."

The incongruity of the wine newsgroup's transplant from rec.food to the alt.* hierarchy is that some people still find alt.* disreputable and with reason. A respected food-wine poster, who would bring much to this newsgroup, told me that the US university where he teaches blocked alt.* because of certain binary photo material with perceived legal risks to the institution, and that other institutions have done likewise. I did point out that he can read it indirectly, via Web pages. I know that some people can testify to various positives on the alt.* newsgroups but this negative is hardcore. As it were.

| When we moved to France in '90, few here had | even heard of the internet; France telecom informed | us that the worlds largest network was "transpac"

In 1980-83 I happened to moonlight editing an engineering trade publication and tracked certain trends. (Such as the announcement that the computer-networking protocols developed among grant recipients from a large US research funding agency, DARPA, would change the moniker from "ARPAnet" to "ARPA Internet" -- 1980 or so -- that's when the famous name began.) But in those days, the French national "TeleTex" initiative promised text-over-phone in homes, with special terminals; a bold independent project with, I believe, France telecom as a major operator. This no doubt subordinated interest in other countries' computer networks, rapidly evolving themselves anyway. On April 1, 1984 in a breakthrough episode, Piet Beertema, a Netherlands networking engineer who'd struggled to get co-operation across the Atlantic for higher bandwidth, staged a practical joke with forged UUCP paths from the Kremlin. I posted on the 20th anniversary a summary of this "Kremvax" caper and sequelae -- the Kremlin sys admin actually named a first networking machine Kremvax, honoring Beertema -- archived currently here:

| Alt-dot has come along way from those heady days!

Was TeleTex the same thing as MiniTel, or was it a predecessor?

- Chris

I was posting to rec.food.wine in 1991 when the first proposal for alt.wine was raised by someone in England. In the late fall of 1992 the newsgroup had hardly anything except discussions of a new group. There were already two subgroups of red.food.drink at the time (and I don't remember them now ) but there was constant argument why we should not have a new group. Finally in February 1993 we were doing a very informal vote which someone might have kept track of but the anti- new group group won. Among us disenchanted types we constantly talked about a new group all spring. One of the big draw backs was the name. Alt.oenophiles was proposed ( and I think that it was proposed by the same guy that had proposed alt.wine two years earlier )to keep the non serious fans out. Finally one of my cohorts at Cray Research up in Beaverton, OR sent out a message on July 4,1993 announcing the new group as alt.wine.I believe that Dean Tudor sent the second message congratulating the group. And here it is 12 years later. So how did you vote Max?

] Was TeleTex the same thing as MiniTel, or was it a predecessor? ]

Chris,

Minitel is the terminal, TeleTex is what it displays -- a sort of protocol, I imagine. The whole thing is referred to as "the minitel" and still exists.

[Max wrote]

] to "ARPA Internet" -- 1980 or so -- that's when the famous name began.) But ] in those days, the French national "TeleTex" initiative promised ] text-over-phone in homes, with special terminals; a bold independent project ] with, I believe, France telecom as a major operator. This no doubt

It remains to be said, though, that the minitel was a brilliant invention, largely diffused, and solved many problems of fully distributed web-based commerce. Most importantly, because it is based on a kiosque system (all billing centralized through FT) there was never any security problem for payment. And of course FT made bushels of francs!

Now, I don't wax nostalgic for the minitel (I don't even have one any more) but since the terminals were free it had a huge penetration. We used it

-- dragging us kicking and screaming back on topic -- in the early 90s to order wine delivered to the appartment, bought train tickets, consulted movie schedules etc; all well before the web existed.

I believe it is thanks to the minitel that the French are currently so far behind at using web commerce. They already had something that worked pretty well, so they had no compelling reason to switch.

-E

I wasn't reading it during the interval when that happened (as I mentioned in passing in the nutshell history) and therefore missed the debate in the early 90s about spinning off a specialty group from rec.food.drink ("RFD," the original, the foundation, renamed from net.wines in 1986). Some of that exchange is in the Google archive now, though unfortunately that archive is weak and unrepresentative for wine newsgroup traffic from the late 1980s to early 1990s (for the same reason I cited on the longer history note in rec.food.cooking), though those were good times for the wine newsgroup (RFD): a period of thoughtful and durable exchanges. (Some are archived privately FWIW.)

Few people would dispute I think, in the long view, that a specialized wine newsgroup was justified, once volume was enough. (Circa 87-88, volume was certainly not enough, even though RFD was still mostly about wine. That is why I objected to making the group moderated in 87, I assumed it would not encourage traffic.) The problem, I believe, is that when the split did occcur later, the long view was in short supply. Evidently there were differences about when to split. Keep in mind that RFD came into existence chiefly as a wine newsgroup and had long carried lots of wine traffic, whether or not every vocal newbie bothered to become aware of that. In

1986-90, solidarity between wine consumers, wine makers, home brewers, beer connoisseurs, and even students from fraternities with the latest highly marketed dyspeptic cocktail, all contributed to traffic that made the group worthwhile. As the volumes of users grew, I gather that the debates about splitting began in earnest, though I saw very little of that when I was reading even as late as 1991 and early 92. When the split did occur, it took characteristically anarchic Usenet form, policy-by-impatience. The right thing to do was to spin off wine traffic as long expected, under the name rec.food.drink.wine, just like

rec.food.drink.beer rec.food.drink.coffee rec.food.drink.tea

I gather that some people resisted this in the debates circa 1993. Given that reality, the right thing, I believe, was to be patient, and do the spinoff a bit later. The wrong thing was to jump over to the alt.* hierarchy (where it was much easier to create newsgroups at whim). People who'd been participating off and on for a decade would have had no problem with patience, I believe; but they were not the ones active on the newsgroup at the time. According to what I've read post-facto in archives, the person who launched and/or popularized the alt.* incarnation did not hang around to participate in it. (Characteristically.) Meanwhile there were other effects: Two parallel, overlapping wine newsgroups for an extended interval afterwards (unexplained to newcomers) -- RFD and AFW. And even a few doddering old-timers (such as me) who looked back later into what had long been "the wine newsgroup," RFD, as everyone presumably knew; saw little activity and none of it on wine; found no specialized wine newsgroup in the obvious place in the newsgroup hierarchy (adjacent to r.f.d.beer, r.f.d.coffee, r.f.d.tea), and moved on elsewhere. I have talked to other older participants with same impression ("Oh, the wine newsgroup? Didn't it go away or something?")

-- Max (Posting to "or something.")

"Max Hauser" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

If the university wants to filter out photos, they actually need to block all newsgroups with 'binaries' in the hierarchy (most fall within the alt.binaries.* hierarchy). If users post binaries to non-binaries groups, they are very quickly taken to task for it and dealt with by their provider if they're a repeat offender. This is just as true of the alt.* groups as it is of rec.*, comp.*, sci.*, etc, groups. And the university is doing a disserve by blocking many quality alt.* groups such as this one.

It sounds like the university's computer department is either ignorant of how newsgroups work or dealing with a lot of politics & red tape.

My thoughts exactly, Jim. All of the common NNTP server software (DNews and INN, primarily) include complex filtering schemes such that they could easily block *.binaries.* or alt.binaries.* In fact, completely blocking alt.* sounds like nothing more than prejudice.

Mark Lipton