Usenet Co-founder Jim Ellis Dies

complex writes "Jim Ellis, one of the cofounders of Usenet, has passed away. Usenet is considered the first large information sharing service, predating the WWW by years." He was 45 years old, and died after battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for 2 years. Usenet of course began in 1979, and is the 2nd of the 3 most important applications on the net (the first being email, and the third being the web). Truly a man who changed the world.

Re:Usenet was NOT the Internet

Thank's for the first damn intelligent post on the sad passing of this man. I was scrolling and about to leave this in disgust. Yes I remember the Net when it was just BBS and Usenet. Had Jim never made this possible who knows where it would have gone? Maybe the corporate whores we have today...maybe not. Anyway...thank you. Thank you for an intelligent post and a bit of history for these kiddies. You little shits need to brush up on where you came from and who made it possible. You little piss-ants disgust me.

Re:in related news...

A whole lot of dead spammers! COOL!

Re:Why I no longer use Usenet

"I remember when Usenet was populated mostly with intelligent academics and techies, and we had thoughtful discussions, and there was no spam, and no flamewars."

-- Everyone that has ever used Usenet for more than a year, regardless of what year they started.

Re:Sad

Please, no HTML in Usenet. It's bad enough as it is. The beauty of Usenet is that you could use any client on any computer practically anywhere to read it. You didn't need a fancy computer with a fancy graphical newsreader... something as simple as tin in a shell account over a 2400 baud modem was good enough (although 14.4K made things better). Usenet's strength lay in the fact that it is (was?) universal. Bastardizing it with HTML (isn't this done already with most spam?), in my opinion, won't bring anything new to the table.

Usenet was NOT the Internet

Back in the 80s, Usenet was the net for those of us who couldn't get on the Internet, because we didn't have the connections into DARPA (by virtue of being a defense contractor or big research university) to get on it. The only connectivity we had was 1200 baud modems (in some cases, 300 baud). The way you got on was that you had a Unix system and a modem, and a contact with someone that was willing to give you a news feed (possibly in exchange for lightening the load by feeding a couple of other folks).

Actually, you didn't even need Unix. I was at a small company that did a lot of digital signal processing, and it was a VMS shop, so we ran Usenet on top of Eunice (a Unix-on-top-of-VMS emulation that sort of worked, but had only symbolic links, no hard links). I was the guy who did the Eunice port for 2.11B news: my first involvement in what would now be called a major open source project.

Back in those days, to send mail you had to have a picture of the UUCP network topology in your head: a series of paths that would get you from here to there. There were a couple of short cuts: sites that would move messages across the country (ihnp4) or internationally (seismo, which later became uunet, the first commercial provider of news feeds).

Because of the way Usenet worked, in the days where it went over UUCP (before NNTP), it was based on personal connections and a web of trust. Things were pretty loose, but if someone ignored community norms and behaved in a way that would clearly damage the fabric of the net, they just lost their news feed and that was that. It was cheap Internet connections and NNTP that made Canter and Siegel (the first big Usenet spammers) possible. But this reliance on personal connections had its downside: some admins enjoyed being petty dictators too much. The UUCP connection between AMD and National Semi (yes, competitors fed each other news on a completely informal basis, it was a different era) was temporarily dropped because of a personal squabble between the sysadmins.

There were many other nets then that weren't the Internet: Bitnet, berknet (at Berkeley) and the like. Figuring out how to get mail around required wizardry: mixes of bang paths (...!oliveb!epimass!jbuck), percent signs, and at-signs ([e-mail]).

The user interfaces on sites like Slashdot are still vastly inferior to newsreader interfaces, like trn and friends. I could quickly blast through hundreds of messages, killing threads I wasn't interested in, skimming to get to the meat. If only sites like Slashdot would pay more attention to what worked so well about Usenet.

Usenet was the Internet

Today, people consider the Web to be the Internet. But back before the web, Usenet held that distinction.

Sure, today Usenet isn't what it used to be, but it is in many ways the model in which discussion boards like slashdot are based. So on a historical basis, it certainly is fair to call it one of the top three applications on the net.

in related news...

the 200 graves adjacent to Jim Ellis are engraved with "MAKE MONEY FAST!!!" and "GET OUT OF DEBT!!!"

That is truly sad

The Internet to me, at first, was news, ftp, and telnet. I spent an inordinate amount of time in 'nn' every day reading sci.electronics, alt.hackers (that was a very fun newsgroup about *real* hacking), and host of others.

When I first saw the 'web' I thought, "this is crap, random words are linked to various things and it doesn't seem to make sense. Back to the newsgroups with me." I realise now that it was just my initial sampling that was total crap, but I kept up with the newsgroups anyway.

I'm totally sad about the state of USENET over the past few years, and this just makes it all worse.

However, for that long time I spent thriving on the USENET, I'll have to thank Jim Ellis. He indirectly helped me find out about Linux, electronics, hardware hacking, etc. Things I do professionally these days.

I think it's a somewhat appropriate time for an:

ObHack (I'm sorry if it's not a very good one. Good hacks, that are not your employer's intellectual property, seem to decrease to almost nothingness when you're no longer a poor student): We had this hub where a heatsink had broken off inside. I grabbed some solid wire and threaded it through the fins and through holes in the circuit board. Through a fair bit of messing around I made sure that it will *never* come out of place again. Ok, that was bad, so I'll add another simple one: Never underestimate the power of a hot glue gun. It allows you to easily provide strain relief for wires that you've soldered onto a PCB and I've also used it to make prototypes of various sensors. If you want to take it apart, and x-acto knife does the trick very easily.

Sigh.

So many important dudez in heaven

Richard Stevens. Douglas Adams (not really internet-related but definitely someone I loved). The ZIP algorithm inventor (sorry I can't remember his name) . And now Usenet's daddy. All rest in heaven now.
But do you think Richard Stevens and the Usenet creator were enjoying today's internet ? They built something that worked perfectly to exchange tons of messages with low bandwidths. Now, everyone has 100x the bandwidth they had when they designed their product. Computers are 100x faster. So what ? Do we find info 100x faster than before ?
Actually not. To read a simple text, you have to download hundreds of kilobytes. 99% is bloat (ads, bloated HTML, useless Java, etc) . Reading messages on a web discussion board is slow. You have to issue dozens of clicks before reading a thread, and wait for every ad to load. Usenet provided a consistent, sorted, easy to parse, and *fast* way to share info with other people.
7 years ago, I was providing access to 12000 newsgroups on Minitel. Minitel is a french terminal, with a 1200 bauds modem (and 75 bauds in emission) . And it worked. People could easily browse all Usenet news. Faster and easier than on web sites.
Another thing is that Usenet let you choose any client. You can choose your preferred fancy interface. Web discussion boards don't let you a lot of choice.
Migrating from Usenet to web sites is stupid. It wastes a lot of bandwidth for nothing. People do this because :

• Everyone can open its own web site
• • People can force users to see web ads to read messages
• Great deal. Web discussion boards provides inconsistency and redundancy. How many web sites discusses the same thing ? How many questions are asked on a web site though they were already answered on another web site ?
• 
  Usenet solved this a long time ago.
  What killed Usenet is the load of uuencoded warez and spam. Everyone has to filter messages to find real ones. Lousy. But we can't fight stupidity. Give people mail access, they will send spam. Give people Napster, they will share copyrighted songs. Give people a CD writer, they will burn commercial software. Give people the web, they will DOS it or try root exploits. Give people usenet, they will kill it. And there's no way back.
  

-- Pure FTP server [pureftpd.org] - Upgrade your FTP server to something simple and secure.

Re:MAKE GREEN CARDS FAST WITH SERDAR ARGIC AND KIB

> I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning.

<AOL>Me too</AOL>

Rest in peace, Jim. Your creation lives on.

Kibo rot-13s, greps the 'net (there's no type, he can't set!) hey there, there goes the Kiboman... and of course Serdar's still Howling Through The Wires, Dick's ARMM'ed (ARMM'd (ARRM'd...))), and I never needed Napster, because I can still get anything I want on Alice's NNTP server [sims.net].

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS. Just as long as it's not alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats at the same time.

Honor Jim Ellis and help others with lymphoma

One way to truly honor Jim Ellis's memory and his contributions to the internet as we know it would be to help find a cure for the cancer that killed him.
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society [leukemia-lymphoma.org] (nat'l. non-profit org.) has this amazing program called Team in Training [teamintraining.org] - basically, you train for an endurance event (marathon, century cycle, triathlon, etc.), and in exchange for 3-5 months of professional coaching, staff support, transportation, accomodation, and entrance fee for your event, you agree to fundraise for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
It's such an inspiring experience. It's totally doable - you can go from complete slothdom to finishing a marathon in just a few months. And you get to meet patients with various blood-related cancers, and hear about their experiences - after you find out what chemo & marrow transplants are like, suddenly your upcoming 14-mile run doesn't seem so hard - and you directly affect their chances of survival with every dollar you raise. It is such a good feeling, both physically and mentally, to be a part of this program.

web vs usenet

I have a vision of a large group of Vikings, all chanting,
"Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"

Have you got anything without spam?

you can still get a tase of what usenet was like..

Most CS schools (at least mine) has their own newsgroups.. many the the groups are oriented for each specific class, but if you go outside those, you can often find cool niche communities using usenet at your school. Our school has an opensource club, and a very active opensource newsgroup.. a good tech politics newsgroup.. general discussion.. etc. Using these groups, you see familiar names, familiar personalities.. it really gives you a taste of what usenet was like in the pre-web / pre-spam days.

-gerbik

Re:RIP

Me too!

Before You Post

Before You Post. You need to be made aware that your message will be forwarded and duplicated on computers all over the world, even the pink squishy ones. It has been estimated that one troll costs millions of dollars. In the case of silicon computer systems, this results in increased costs to maintain and install new hardware. In the case of pink squishy systems, it results in a decreased regard for humanity in general, and contributes to the viewpoint that there are just too many sick people out there. The dollar cost of cynicism hasn't been estimated, but there is strong evidence that it impairs the function of the pink squishy computer in ways that aren't fully understood. Are you really sure you want to post that troll? Hit x to cancel, p to post.

Actually...

There are many usenet groups that still function as they once did (mid 90's). Some even have more traffic and less SPAM than when the real SPAM WARS were on. It's mostly pr0n groups and unfortunate groups with pr0n alike names (like alt.lesbians) that attract SPAMers. For me the Usenet is as usefull as whe I first started using it.

The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.

Cheers..
--
$HOME is where the .*shrc is

MAKE GREEN CARDS FAST WITH SERDAR ARGIC AND KIBO!!

I remember the end of the Usenet glory days (mid-90s, unfortunately just after the September That Never Ended), before it was swallowed by spam. Usenet IMHO is the place where net.culture grew up, even if it wasn't part of the Internet in the beginning. No offense to the /. community, but to those of you who never experienced it, Usenet back in the day was a place the likes of which we probably won't see again.

Places like /. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet, and you likewise still get some of it on mailing lists now, but take a look through Google Groups now -- too much garbage, and the community that's there is somewhat isolated because Usenet isn't as integral to the net experience as it once was.

Two taps and a v-sign for the man -- not everyone can claim to have created a true community single-handedly.

/brian

So many good people are dying

Am I the only one who's noticed that there's a hell of a lot of people dying lately who have made great contributions to humanity (well, specifically, who've made my own life a lot better) - Douglas Adams, John Lee Hooker, and now Jim Ellis. Damn, the world is becomming a worse place :( RIP.

Re:Actually...

The nasty thing IMHO is all the email collecting bots that wander trough ALL groups pr0n or no pr0n. A newbie has no chance to know about this and fake an email or SPAM-prove it. Many an email accounts are rendered useless by this.

I use my real email address in Usenet postings, and I post quite frequently to several groups (comp.lang.perl.misc and sci.space.science being at the top of the list). I feel that it is polite to offer a real, unmunged address to those who might wish to contact you privately. Part of this attitude probably comes from my having started using Usenet way back when in the early 80s, when the online world was indeed a different place.

So, my email address does in fact get harvested by a lot of Usenet crawlers, and I get a lot of spam sent to me as a result. But I never see 95% of it. The trick is to use a good mail filter, and to spend perhaps 15 minutes a week tweaking its patterns. This can be a fun activity for...well, for anyone likely to be reading /., actually. :-)

Don't let the abusers chase you into hiding. Use the power that technology gives you. Take control.

--

Re:Actually...

You can have it both ways by posting a mutating but valid address that will expire in a month or so but is still obviously munged such that a human putting it in an address book can figure out your real address. The main ways of doing this are the Sendmail '+' hack ([e-mail]), and temporary third-level DNS entries ([e-mail]).

Another gentleman of the old school RIP

Perhaps like many slashdotters, my initial exposure was through USENET newsgroups, where I'd obtain help with my Amiga computer, C64, nethack [nethack.org], Ren and Stimpy and a host of other things. Life would have been less full, without their tremendous contribution. My heart and thanks go out to him, his family and friends.

--
All your .sig are belong to us!

Re:Uh....

Usenet is more important than the web?

Depends on what you consider important, but in some ways, Yes. UseNet was one of the first non-centralized way of distributing information. It is also quite possibilty the greatest resource for the personal sharing of knowledge in near real time with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people all over the world. Why you ask? Despite what you might see over at alt.binaries.pictures.* and alt.barney.die.die.die the singal to noise ratio is infinitely better than doing a search on google and you can generally get multiple informed replys to questions on almost any subject....

Re:MAKE GREEN CARDS FAST WITH SERDAR ARGIC AND KIB

Places like /. and k5 still have an echo of the old Usenet

I can't detect any such echo. Your hearing must be very good.

Agreed. Slashdot is much more like the BBSs that many people should remember from their high school days.

For us, it wasn't September that brought on the yearly flood of newbies... it was Christmas, with lots of kids getting new computers as presents from their parents, and somehow finding their way onto the BBS scene.

My first experience of USENET was that it was much more mature than the BBS culture. People on USENET did not engage in fp-like antics, like we did on the BBSs. The professional programmers and sysadmins who frequented USENET did not concern themselves about being 31337 hacker doodz like on the BBS scene. Most shocking to me at the time, people mostly posted to USENET using their real names.

Re:So many good people are dying

Yeah, I've noticed that since about 4 years ago, when both Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died. I think as you get older, you end up recognizing more people and gradually as time goes on, they'll all have to eventually leave this life. It's not that the number of people dying has increased; it's that more people have affected you and your perception has increased.

Keenan

Rest in Peace

It would be fitting if his final resting place were to be topped with an eternal flame. Jim would've appreciated the humor in that.

My condolences to all his loved ones.

He deserves respect

Besides the obvious need to have respect for the dead, I feel that Jim Ellis deserves respect because he made the first internet resource that strived to create a community atmosphere. This is the model that the web boards found on many websites were based on, and certainly was an influence on the Slashdot model. Whoever made the sarcastic comment about the graves saying "make money now", I understand you were trying to be funny, but I have a hard time laughing about people who have recently died. It's hardly Jim's fault Usenet has become such a wasteland.

Old UseNet founders don't die...

They get archived by DejaNews.

And then _it_ dies.