Just been doing some “house cleaning”. The last messages in uk.rec.aviation:
I used to hang out on rec.aviation in the 1990s…
Yahoo Groups are also shuting down this month, this was not a good news for the vintage gliding group who still bloody active on Yahoo since the 2000’
rec.aviation? sorry A_A that goes way beyond internet big bang as I know it 
alt.euroga anyone? ;)
I got out of a few yahoo groups when they changed the logins and I could not log in anymore. No idea what happened. But quite a few were active in the electronics field. I suspect those people moved to eevblog.com which is a good forum for that. You can’t beat a proper web based forum for continuity of information, search-ability, etc.
But all proper web forums are facing the challenge of cost recovery (hosting, and especially the constant admin costs) while most of the advert-clicking traffic is defecting to fb, twitter, instagram and other instant-satisfaction channels. To give an example, bloody google have just rigged chrome so it suppresses http objects within an https site. One can see their “we are oooh so clean civil liberties people” reasoning but it breaks a lot of stuff, so I had to migrate peter2000.co.uk and some other stuff to https. That is actually a hassle because the certificates expire and none of the solutions are hassle-free. So I put it behind Cloudflare, like EuroGA has been for years; this is free for nonprofit sites. But I can see a lot of people running hobby sites (and forums) packing it all up and doing gardening instead.
rec.aviation.* was good – mostly American, but I learnt more about flying from that than from all my training, theory, etc. Like most of Usenet, it got killed by spammers. The internet isn’t what it was say 10+ years ago. For example on EuroGA anything up to 50% of joinups are malicious, and there is no automated way of handling that to a degree sufficient to prevent stuff happening fairly regularly.
alt.euroga anyone?
Technically it is possible Would have to be read-only however, for obvious reasons.
Anyone familiar with Delphi Forums? I never got around to using USENET but my first online interaction was with some guys trying to set up P2P wireless network using 802.11b equipment in Greece back in 2000 (later AWMN). Dialup was the norm and very expensive in Greece back then so they set up their own wide area network that eventually ended up covering all of Greece. DSL and fiber later killed the project. I guess this is the reason I ended up working with communications later on in life.
Real men fetched their newsgroups via. UUCP.
Some of us still remember FidoNet …
Isn’t UUCP the way to access usenet? For example Forte Agent, or Outlook Express did that. Google offered access via “google groups” as a web interface; not sure if that still works.
sci.electronic.design and comp.arch.embedded are both still very active.
UUCP is the backend store and forward transfer protocol; my Linux 0.97 UUCP node in the 1990s would dial up the university (who gave me access to prevent my curiosity getting me in trouble otherwise) and batch transfer mail and news back and forth. Then the frontend application (e.g. tin, nn) to read/write news, and another to read/write mail (e.g. pine). Anything outgoing is spooled onto the filesystem for transfer the next day. No real time TCP/IP connection for SMTP/NNTP.
I mention FidoNet, which conceptually was similar but for modem based bulletin boards . It also had a store and forward approach. Possibly it was inspired by UUCP.
All off topic old mans stuff at this stage.
? only relevant to aviation in the same way we can all say “back in the day of vacuum based instruments and physical maps …”
NNTP was the way to access Usenet.
I wrote some web forum software years ago, and I made an NNTP server for it so people could also use it through a newsreader (generally, newsreader interfaces were much better than web boards in the late 90s/early 2000s – and in many cases, still are!)
