/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5165430
>Usenet
Never heard of it. Earliest internet I used was AOL. Curious what is tho so hAve a bump :^)

t. 31yr old boomer

I still use it - started in 96

>>5165430
Of course we were on it. In the 1990s one of the first stops was alt.binaries.warez and it's associated groups.

The 90s CD-Rom games often had their FMV opening videos removed to save space, and you still had to download hundreds of fragmented files, and some were missing or corrupt so you needed PAR files to repair them or recreate the missing files. Those early programs were so crude and time consuming too as multiple programs were needed to collect, assemble and unzip your stolen games and much of it was done through a lot of typing in the command prompt.

Some assholes would password protect their RARs and try to reroute you to a paid site or other website to get a password to extract your file, and you only found this out after you downloaded and assembled the whole thing. Also the malware, holy fuck was usenet dirty back then. It seemed way worse and shady than the modern internet. So many fake files and shit was out there.

When Newzbin came out that was a magical piece of software that brought a lot of quality of life improvements to usenet, and after napster died Newsbin became the new badguy for the MPAA. But then people quickly exploited nzb files for malware and for bait and switch executable files.

I haven't used it much since around 2005 though. Has usenet got better or worse over the years? I imagine the newsreaders and file management tools got a lot better over the years.

I briefly used it when I was 5 to get cheat codes for genesis games but the time i'd really start using the computer several years later it went out of fashion and I browsed newgrounds

>>5165498
kek i remember this shit. having downloaded a gorillion RAR parts, then glueing them all together with another program, only to realize that one part of 100 is corrupted.

>>5165430

alt.video.laserdisc was my haunt.

The entire rec.audio family of groups were raging dumpster fires.

>>5165430
Plenty of people still use usenet exclusively for piracy today.

The first online posts I ever made were to alt.tv.simpsons when I was 15. I never ever want to see those posts again.

>>5165601

Using usenet to pirate makes you feel like you are a made guy, no one can touch you

>>5165430
Isn't this thread, like, not related to /vr/

>>5165698
It's very related. There is a mountain of video game history in the Google usenet archive. Want a review post of an Atari 2600 game when it new in 1982? There are newsgroup postings that old.

>>5165698
> usenet
> not /vr/ related
this is zoomer talk.

>>5165430
>Were any of you old farts on Usenet back in the day?
yes. early 90s

>>5165693
because nobody can. the only people that get touched are the uploaders.

>>5165698
Where else would he post it? /g/? Good luck being seen amongst all the paid shills arguing about fucking processors, CS students bitching about how hard their classes are, are OS shitposting.
Here, at least, OP can rightly assume most of us are of a certain age and at least a little tech-inclined.

>>5165430
>Were any of you old farts on Usenet back in the day?
>implying I ever left

>>5165498
>>5165515
>pirating games in a huge list of RARs is a 'retro' thing
Niggers, have you even been alive for the past decade?

>>5165498
>download 300mb game over dialup over the course of several days
>it turns out to be alsscan porno instead
Everything went better than expected.

No, I first got on the internet in the mid 90s dial-up Geocities days.

>>5165446
Just because it's an anonymous board doesn't mean to have the slightest shred of quality in a post or fuck off. If it's later on then who cares but the first post this shit.

>>5165446
Just because it's an anonymous board doesn't mean not to have the slightest shred of quality in a post or fuck off. If it's later on then who cares but the first reply shit like this. Bump after 8 minutes? what a retard.

Only getting online from home in the year 2000 I only ever used usenet for downloading or very slightly for discussion when it used to be part of google groups for a while.

>>5165430

>>5165954
Goddamn, i remember when i spent days to get some game and instead got a video of some hot brazillian chick that looked 15 at the oldest dancing with 5-6 buff tan men and it quickly turned into a porno. The whole thing was so extreme for my kid self i just stared at it in shock, then deleted the files. I still regret it.

>>5166102
Man, I remember being really young and deleting porn that took forever to download on 56k after coming to it because it felt "dirty"... then massively regretting it later.

>>5165515
>not knowing how to use par files to repair an archive in such a case

>>5165430
Corewar....
*cracks open a Bawls*
now THAT was an esport.

>>5165430
>back in the day
No. I didn't start using it until the late 80's.

There are usenet archives going back to the early 1980s. It's possibly the single most fascinating thing on the entire internet.

>>5165951
>a huge list of RARs is a 'retro' thing
>Niggers, have you even been alive for the past decade?
Everything you downloaded off usenet back then that wasn't porn images was a RAR file.

>>5165498
>The 90s CD-Rom games often had their FMV opening videos removed to save space

oh god don't remind me. I still have cracked versions of HOMM3 and Red Alert somewhere, with the fmvs and music removed. Both games fit on 1 CD like that.

>>5165951
>>5166280
You zoomers, what they are talking about is how the files all had a maximum filesize of like 4mb, which meant you had to glue all the parts together with special joiners, and there were special "par" files to make sure none were corrupted, but if you made a mistake it could all go wrong. I forget the specifics and wasn't around during the absolute heyday of it, but that is what the first guy is talking about there.

>>5166291
I am the first guy, replying to the other guy. I was the one who first mentioned PAR files in the thread. Those came around late though.

>>5166291
Rats and zip files were fucking magical by comparison to running weird bat files and commands to stitch shit together

>>5165951
only scene groups still do releases in split rars, since they still primarily distribute via topsites (ie: FTP).

I remember still using split rars throughout the 00s with an accompanying SFV. But by the 2010s it was just easier to use one single RAR archive. It has built-in parity, and torrents also have their own hash check.

>>5166291
>which meant you had to glue all the parts together with special joiners

I've been pirating shit back when ARJ was the most common archive, and I've never needed to glue anything together. Every archiver was capable of moving on to the next part file on its own. Parity check was just 1+ application, and it could rebuild your shit even if 8 out of 10 files were corrupt (assuming the corruption was not larger than x% of the total size, where x% is the size of the PARs in relation to the full size).

You are way overblowing the difficulty of this. It was a well oiled machine and it worked beautifully well as long as you weren't a retard. Which was a requirement for using computers at the time, anyway.

>>5166305
Before the nzb era there were a few more hoops to jump through. It was improvements in newsreaders that brought the biggest QOL improvements.

>>5166305
...you have no clue what I am talking about and are a dumbass.

>>5165781
I can't be bothered to dig through my folders but I remember seeing Usenet or maybe BBS posts that were nearly identical to modern /v/.

>>5166280
To clarify, the yEnc blocks you downloaded were assembled into rar file fragments but by the early 2000s this process was mostly invisible and handled by the reader. Early days you had to use a yEnc decoder in a command prompt.

Pic related was after everything was made easier.

Uaed to download binaries. Par2s were a god send, and the small files meant easy repairs and less risk of mounds of corrupted data

>>5165559
Can you tell me more? Why did you go to alt.video.laserdisc? What was rec.audio like?

>>5165940
don't forget, you're everywhere forever

>>5165430
I first used Usenet around 1993 when a local Wildcat! BBS started hosting many of the binary groups with a Planet Connect feed. It was slow, always about 16-18 hours behind in "tossing the packets" and only had about five days retention.

>>5165467
me too, although I started using it mid 2000's. still the best place to pirate movies, music, tv shows, and porn. once something is posted it's pretty much there forever and it's incedibly hard to get malware. never saw any reason to try kaza or tor.

>>5166384
You remind me of an elderly uncle I have who asked me where to get blank VHS tapes. Apparently he had bought a big stash of them when shops were starting to run out of them but now he was out of them and he didn't know how to get those gosh darn dvrs to work.

This was like ~5 years ago.

Was anyone here involved in the SNES etc BBS scene back when those consoles were current? It appears as though some prototype versions of games leaked even back then. Cybernator in particular comes to mind, where a prototype version which is arguably superior to the final US release (it has the character portraits like the original JP version as well as a sound test) was apparently posted some months before it came to stores. Would've been cool to be an internet savvy kid in the early nineties, playing some games before they ever came out. I was born in the late 80s so I was too young to experience that.

>>5166369

Before there were good web forums for A/V discussions, there was usenet.
alt.video.laserdisc and alt.video.dvd were the first places A/V nerds could really swap useful info or find out about titles yet to be announced.
Rec.audio boards were all flame-war dumpster fires roughly split between reasonable, logical people, and irrational autists convinced that green felt-tip pens could make every CD sound better (and other crazy shit like that).

>>5166420
How would you get a ROM working back then? Wasn't that before emulators?

>>5166584
You'd write it to a floppy disk and run it on an actual console using something like a Game Doctor, I assume.

Usenet had a lot of literally insane people--they made /b/ and /pol/ look harmless.

>>5166616
>Usenet had a lot of literally insane people
Just google this fucker.

>>5166319
he knows exactly what you are talking about and you are retarded
>>5166316
no. you ran your par program (quickpar) to verify integrity of the files (and repair if required) and then ran your archive program to extract the files. that's it.
>>5165951
those downloads only come in multiple parts because the torrent was made by someone who didn't extract the archive downloaded from usenet/topsite, kiddo.

>>5166643

It could be someone else with the same name, but the majority of Google hits are for a dentist in Fresno.
If it's the same guy... glad my dentist isn't in Fresno.

>>5166643
Tron Guy was an Animaniacs newsgroup poster who probably wanted to fuck Dot. He's also redpilled, apparently.
http://www.conmicro.com

>>5166616
The furry by the name of Michael Hirtes, an obsessed Chris-chan follower and "troll," was apparently an online nuisance even dating back to the Usenet days.

>>5166616
>Usenet had a lot of literally insane people
Off the top of my head:
Tony Gaza - movie critic/legendary troll. Fan of Once Upon a Time in the West and Bubblegum Crisis

Space Boss aka DrSmith666 aka "Bass Guitar God". Singlehandedly laid waste to rec.games.video.classic in it's dying days with bizarre troll posts about shit like considering consoles arcade games. I sort of liked him, as he was an actual collector of classics and an amusing nut. His homepage lives on, for a sample of Space Boss madness: http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/lcsboots/

"Uncle" Al Schwartz. A crazed ultra high IQ chemist/Mensa member. Found on the physics/chem groups. Brutal towards mental midgets and liberals. His homepage: http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/

Bonus nuts:
Kaz Tanaka - a Japanese regular on soc.culture.japan. If you were Japanese, you had better be Kinai Jap from Osaka etc...otherwise you were a lower than dirt, natto eating, brutal "Tokyo Jap" to Kaz. Koreans were "Kimcheemen" in Kaz talk.

Chuande Tu - known for posting "My Miserable Story" spam since last millennium (and still at it!), this poor bastard has had a cabal of local police and town fathers persecuting him (in his mind at least) and wants the world to know.

Scott Lifshine, aka "The Wereo". Known for tremendous, high volume spam about his "band" and song "Nuclear Warrior". Claim to fame: taping a 70s music festival "Cal Jam" off the radio and boasting of rights to fame/riches based on his shitty tapes. Here is the psycho (and alleged sex offender), RIP, in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GTKTDaB03I

>>5166660
>no. you ran your par program (quickpar) to verify integrity of the files
quickpar came out in 2003. We are talking before that easymode era.

>>5166675

The troll I remember best was SAVETELE, a guy who promptly shit his pants over DVDs being mostly letterboxed, and who went on a crusade against the "widescreen conspiracy".
He also claimed that letterboxing violated the Americans With Disabilities Act, and was going to file a class-action lawsuit against all the studios until they stopped making widescreen DVDs.

>>5166681
OHOH, just remembered a fucking GREAT one. A real world threat at that. The troll called Starcade showed up on rec.arts.anime.misc on a crusade against fansubs, torrents, and everything but legit DVDs. In real life, he was the stalker of washed up teenybopper Debbie Gibson: http://www.playbill.com/article/ny-police-arrest-deborah-gibson-stalking-suspect-at-bway-theatre-com-75581

When called out about his anime views, Starcade would pout and threaten his foes by telling them he was insane, had been arrested, and wasn't afraid to die. More: https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Starcade

Fucker was a real life Mark David Chapman and boot hater.

>>5166685
I think I saw a doc on that guy

>>5166693
oh wait nevermind that was on the Tiffany stalker

>>5166403
how do I remind you of your uncle again? I get the same shit you'd get from tor only it's always there and downloads much faster, and my news service scans everything for malware so I don't waste my time downloading garbage

here's a bit of usenet lore for you...

because of something James Cameron wtote on some screenwriting group, Harlan Ellison sued him and got his name added to the credits of The Terminator, even though the only similarity between the movie and the episode of the Outer Limits Harlan claims the movie plaguerized, was several seconds of a future hellscape that Harlan didn't even fucking design. but all he had to do was cite in court a comment Cameron jokingly posted about how "sci fi screenwriting is easy. All you have to do is steal from old Outer Limits episodes" The movie studio decided to settle and Harlan gets his name credited and gets royalties for something he had nothing to do with. as much I still like his work, he was always a hypocritical cocksucker

>>5166675
It's really not good that you know that shit and you're spreading it to others now, as well as reinforcing it to yourself. Notoriety is what gives these trolls life. Don't get me wrong, a good clown can be fun to to laugh at, but some of the usenet trolls clearly strike me as made-up characters.

>>5166660
This has to be a joke.There is no way anyone could legit be this dumb.

>>5166675
The sci.space.* groups had a schizophrenic named Brad Guth on them who'd post about the Moon landings being faked and the Voyager probes were a nuclear satellite run by the CIA. Apparently he was on medications and when he forgot to take them, he'd go online and spam his nonsense.

They also had a beef going on between group regular Om (who was Jewish) and Tommy Lee Elfritz, a neo-Nazi and convicted pedophile hiding down in the Bahamas.

>>5166727
Don't even get me started on the political groups and the posters in those.

>>5166698
Well you said you never saw any reason to use "kazaa or tor". Well, for popular stuff you will get reliable and good, full speed torrents from public sites within seconds. For less popular stuff you might have to search a lot and find private trackers but you'd be surprised. As far as I knew Kazzaa has been dead for like 10+ years lol? If I was downloading a p2p I would download shareaza or limewire and even they're on their last legs.

The most important point is that these are all free. Meanwhile how much do you pay for your usenet? Paying is basically cheating. And the advantage you have over torrents is small minuscule in most cases, or at least not worth it for the vast majority of people.

Satmar al-Hassidim filled alt.tv.simpsons in 1997-early 98 with /pol/ rants about Lisa being a Marxist Turkojewish dyke activist. He was one of the legends of Usenet trolling.

>>5166675
>Space Boss aka DrSmith666 aka "Bass Guitar God". Singlehandedly laid waste to rec.games.video.classic in it's dying days with bizarre troll posts about shit like considering consoles arcade games. I sort of liked him, as he was an actual collector of classics and an amusing nut. His homepage lives on, for a sample of Space Boss madness: http://www.angelfire.com/ca2/lcsboots/
I seem to remember him, but the true trolling legend on the rec.games.video groups was Charles Doane, this angry /r9k/-tier incel who was obsessed with hating pirates to the point where he actually wanted to see them tortured and executed. Also hated PC gamers because he said they were all pirates. He also talked about how he could kill anyone who set foot on his property and hide the body where no one would ever find it.

>>5166735
Hearing about all these old school internet trolls is super interesting. Funny how online behavior has pretty much been the same throughout time

>>5166732
I pay $9.99 buts only because I can browse thumbnails and DL porn via web browser. it's way cheaper with other services, but easynews is like netflix if it also had HC porn.

alt.atheism had some truly insane people. It wasn't just like lyl Christfags r dumb, they were guys who actually wanted to put religious people in concentration camps and shoot them.

>>5166741
No... no it's not. A lot of these are made-up personas designed to get attention, others are people who there is legitimately something very wrong with them. This is how their notoriety lives. At best a complete waste of time.

Let's not forget Rob Wade, this guy who'd spam entire walls of text about how homosexuals were disease magnets who were all going to Hell as he also added in a bit about how luscious young boys' bodies and buttholes were.

So did you have or remember actual good conversations of videogames? Any link worth?

>>5166756
The top post was mine. All I wanted to do was innocently help some guy with a game level.

>>5166716

Actually, the one thing Cameron supposedly "stole" from Ellison was the moment Reese points the gun at the LAPD officer and demands to know what year it is.
Apparently, there was a similar moment in an Outer Limits episode written by Ellison. Still, the movie The Terminator doesn't revolve around that one scene.

>>5166781
>now a bunch of fucking jocks are laughing at Ranma. Motherfuckers.

>>5166781
He is not wrong, 80s anime is on another level, with some exceptions from the 90s.

>>5166420
I was. I still have a few disk cards with PCE/MD games on them from my MGD. And they still work. I used to get prereleases all the time. Mostly for computers but occasionally for consoles. Late 80's - early 90's was the golden age for that kind of thing.

>>5166880
I wonder where some of that stuff came from. Guess the obvious answer would be magazine writers who dumped the data from their preview copies for e-cred, or people who were somehow linked to the development of the games and cared more about their online presence than keeping their work confidential.

>>5166675
http://web.archive.org/web/20030514145917/www.crushyiffdestroy.com/show-article.php?file=falk

Dennis Falk was among the reasons Tiny Toon Adventures was cancelled.

>>5166895
Yup. Bear in mind that "magazine writers" were any kid who could string together a few words about a game and developers were any kid who could help make one. Without todays social media and narcissism it was nearly impossible to track down the leak. Cred was pretty much limited to the handful of nerds who cared. If something was newsworthy the MSM might even change the names of the made up names we used to stay anonymous. So not the kind of e-cred you're used to.

I used to post back in the day in mainly Playstation groups and ones for various bands. Main Usenet weirdo I remember was some guy who would post various surreal fantasies involving UFOs and Jim Morrison across as many music groups as he could to great howls of anger.
These days I still use it for downloads, but it's hard to get uncensored feeds - any mainstream TV show is automatically filtered from the major providers. That said it's essential if you are into MAME as new ROM dumps get released there first in alt.binaries.mame.

>>5166945
What a clickbait description, at worst she was stalking one of the VAs at the time -which to be honest is admittedly problematic but that's still a jump to conclusions.
What fascinates me even more is that there's actually someone who took the time to do any research on old internet posts to reconstruct some hardcore shitposting from a decade earlier and write a full article about it. Imagine anyone doing the same shit with current tripfags on this site ...

80s/90s internet is the most fascinating fucking thing ever

>>5166643
With some of these people, I'm as interested to know what ever became of them, like if they moved on with their lives, cleaned up their act, found some irl success, got married, etc, if they're still out there and spouting their delusions on some other corner of the internet, or if they just faded into nothing, either dying or weaning themselves from the web to live an unfulfilling life with their greatest contribution to the world remaining their nutty usenet posts from the early 90s.

>>5166666

>>5166678
>you ran your par program
>>5166725
it's hard to believe but you are definitely proof of the extreme low intelligence of the average person

>>5167053
Just wait, we'll see it happen once the trump administration is over, except it will be historical researchers trying to explain the 2016 election results.

Just think about that, fucking memefrog could end up in a history textbook someday.

>>5165430
I didn't have access to a computer until after AOL was a thing

>>5167172
>it's hard to believe but you are definitely proof of the extreme low intelligence of the average person
Holy shit stop, I'm now an "average person"? I feel bad if you're legit feeble-minded, but you can't be saying ignorant and clueless shit and insulting other people who are stating the reality.

>>5167356
ok retard

Some of the talk.politics postings from the Bush years were nightmare fuel.

>>5167646
>the Bush
Your young is showing

I mean, srsly wtf. You must be young as fuck if you're referring to the second Bush and not the first one.

>>5167947
he must be over 20 yo, not exactly young af grandpa

>>5167947
There really wasn't that much political posting from GHW Bush's presidency, the big Internet explosion happened during the Clinton years.

>>5166741

this. usenet sounds based as fuck

>>5167963
wtf is that supposed to mean, calling him "grandpa"? Is that supposed to be a pejorative?

If he is 20 years old then he is still young af considering the population of the world. So just ask yourself what the everliving fuck you are trying to say dumbass.

I remember Bush's presidency like yesterday and the internet was pretty much the exact same, but politicians didn't really start to use the internet and there were a lot less memes and shitposting. Usenet was pretty much dead by that stage though.

and how did this differ from telnet? ive tried using telnet a couple of times now and found a few various novelties.. is usenet still running?

>>5168035
>I remember Bush's presidency like yesterday and the internet was pretty much the exact same, but politicians didn't really start to use the internet and there were a lot less memes and shitposting. Usenet was pretty much dead by that stage though.
Usenet didn't really die until Obama was president.

>>5168062
Name active groups worth caring about in 2007.

>>5168062
Thanks Obama. >:(

Most popular Usenet groups, especially rec. and alt., were flooded with spam around 2013 in my country. Seems pretty late. I still have this news server set in Thunderbird, but it was changed to read only mode. I wonder why this clean, easy solution lost to more complex and heavy web based services.

>>5168319
Estonia?

>>5168321
Nope, Poland.

>>5165430
Yes, and fidonet before that.

The cool thing about using the internet then was they actually had FAQs for individual message boards and they would explain what trolls are and that the way to deal with trolls is to ignore them.

There were some crazy trolls but enough people ignored them and they were harmless.

Now it has reached the level with the president of the USA is trolling on twitter and this is a top story on the 6 o'clock news around the world.

I wish people would remember to ignore trolls like in the 1990s internet days.

>>5168439
>Now it has reached the level with the president of the USA is trolling on twitter and this is a top story on the 6 o'clock news around the world.

bow down to the power of the most based, most successful troll of all time.

>>5168445
All trolls eventually get the hammer.

>>5166746
So, like, Stalinists?

>>5166578
That's cool, I assume you had an LD since it was superior video format? I briefly considered getting one so that I could watch the "roadshow" version of John Wayne's "The Alamo" but I figure it was probably too crappy of a film to really justify 100 bucks spent on it.

The audio boards sound hilarious, basically a combination of /mu/ and /g/.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, what did "alt" and "rec" mean? Were they a category of place to message one another? What did people call spaces on Usenet anyway, "boards" or "pages" or something else?

>>5166675
Uncle Al is a fucking trip, actually does sound smart as fuck too. His commentary on the poor and third worlders and on diversity hires/admissions are pretty funny.

>>5168445
It's more like we, the young and youngish nerds of the world, were either unable or unwilling to explain to all the newbies and normalfags of this planet, what a troll was and how to deal with it. As ever eternal, the fault lies with the internet numbskulls that bought their first apple iCock and jumped on surveillancebook for a beef about their meaningless lives. RTFM, for fuck's sake!

>>5168637
>Sorry if this is a dumb question, what did "alt" and "rec" mean? Were they a category of place to message one another? What did people call spaces on Usenet anyway, "boards" or "pages" or something else?
They're called Usenet Groups. If I remember rightly, alt stands for alternative. The reason why they are alternative is that there were more rigid hierarchies of groups (for example for different computer model discussion there was the comp.sys.* tree with e.g. comp.sys.ibm.pc, comp.sys.amiga) that were intended as "official" groups. These had to be agreed on by vote by various officials to start getting traction and carried by usenet servers. They tended to take things more seriously and often were properly moderated so posts had to be approved.

The alt hierarchy however was "anything goes", anyone could make a group and if it got popular it would stick. This led to the creation of the binaries groups and ultimately these became a lot more popular and enduring than the now largely defunct main Usenet discussion tree.

>>5166746
fucking same, i'm tired of this performative nonchalance and 'muh fedora' bullshit, fuck it, murder all religious people

Is this the most fascinating thread in /vr/ history?

>>5165971

you must be fun at parties, fgt

>>5165971
extremely low quality post

>>5168690
What did 'binaries' mean in this sense? Was there a reason for that word choice?

>>5168637
>That's cool, I assume you had an LD since it was superior video format?
I'm a different poster, but yeah I got into LD around 1997 so I could collect anime on a higher resolution format that wouldn't wear out compared with tapes. Expensive shit - paid $100 for the Criterion Akira CAV triple gatefold (when it was going for $200+ as it was out of print, at least - was really pleased after literally combing the entire net to find a sealed one) and movies like $40. Bought the Harlock movie and Urusei Yatsura movie LDs directly from Animeigo.

I still collect LD for the incredible packaging and art in the big Japanese box sets. A few years back, there was a nice glut of collections being dispersed on eBay from oldtime otaku - one of my prizes was getting the Maison Ikkoku box that cost like $2000 in the 90s for just fifty bucks. Titles like that were the Rolls Royce of home video, along with a nice high end player.

>>5169014

"Binaries" meant anything not text, since usenet was a strictly ASCII environment. Most binaries groups pirated software, but images, audio, and video were also routinely posted in "binaries" newsgroups.

>>5169026
and you had to use a special program to download the thousands of bin files then convert them to your .exe or .mp3 or whatever. right? newsbinpro being the most popular amongst the people who's told me this stuff.

>>5169036
>and you had to use a special program to download the thousands of bin files then convert them to your .exe or .mp3 or whatever. right? newsbinpro being the most popular amongst the people who's told me this stuff.
Yes. As Usenet could only host pure text, there were a few ways in which files could be encoded from a binary into text and back again. Most Usenet clients could handle this, but as people realized the potential of Usenet for pure piracy specialized download only clients (instead of the traditional newsreader style) started to appear that filtered out non-binary emails and had more intelligent download features such as automatically performing error checking and repairs with PAR files (parity files that could tell you which bits of currently downloaded files were corrupt, if any, and also could serve as replacement files for any files corrupt or even missing on your usenet server) and automatic extraction of archives, etc.
Don't forget this stuff all exists NOW if you want to play with, I'm not sure many isps offer free usenet feeds anymore, but you may be lucky. A good basic download client is Grabit, but you'll have to pay to get access to a usenet server with actually good retention of binaries (even back in the day isp usenet servers would often deliberately not support alt.binaries groups or have very poor retention making them unusable with the intention usenet access was strictly for discussion posting). Most actual discussion in groups is dead, but you might be able to find something interesting going on if you look. There are also a LOT of viruses spread across messages there, so watch out for that..

>>5165430
Yes, that's how I got into Internet culture to begin with.

>>5166945
Very interesting, thanks.

>>5166746
This is exactly why I hate identifying as an atheist in real life. I don't want to be lumped in with the insane lefties.

>>5169301
For whatever little value the bipartisan political systems have, surely identifying insane behavior (like promoting widespread murder) as being related to a persons political "leaning" is doing humanity a disservice. Or perhaps you're right and insane behavior and partisan politics do in fact go hand in hand.

>>5166746

I went on an AIM chatroom dedicated to Atheism sometime around the year 2000 and had a very similar experience. I was shocked. I grew up in a Christian family and was absolutely dumbfounded by how insane these atheists were (and probably still are).

>>5169301
Being an atheist makes you an insane person

The cool thing that really differed about internet back then was when someone said something controversial and/or straight up stupid, people would just ignore it, laugh at you or "that's like... just your opinion, man". Now, even on an anonymous board people (I find myself doing it, even as an old fart) it's almost that people need to keep up their "street cred". Disagree politically or religiously and there's a flamewar, too many people enjoy the same thing?... then that's when contrarians inevitably show up. Also if someone said they did a rudimentary speedrun of a game or bought something rare, even with no evidence, it could be assumed they were telling the truth.

People weren't chasing those dopamine highs. Also, what ever happened to just regular funny websites like Seanbaby, Something Awful, Old Man Murray, Maddox, Stile Project, etc... usually one man or two at most teams making great content for no real reason other than entertain. That's what it was, old internet was the wild west, now it's "civilized" and boring.

I didn't start using it until 03ish. My ISP had a free news server, you just had to talk to the technician and explain why you wanted access. Weird, I know, but it was a small town ISP. I used it to get and distribute Dreamcast games, didn't bother with anything else.

A large fraction of the population is atheist (I am and have been since young). Thing is that as an atheist, there isn't all that much to discuss about theology, because you don't believe any of that stuff. Maybe you can have interesting discussion about how people get swept up into belief systems, but it's not an ongoing interesting thing. There's nothing to "fight" for.

This is why people and groups who go out of their way to identify themselves as atheists are often complete nutcases and very hateful and toxic people. They don't represent normal atheists in any way. Normal atheist don't think of atheism and science to be used like some kind of card to use against religious people, that's psychopathic. Give me a strongly religious person ANY day than someone who goes out their way to identify as atheist.

>>5169678
>The cool thing that really differed about internet back then was when someone said something controversial and/or straight up stupid, people would just ignore it, laugh at you or "that's like... just your opinion, man".

man, I dunno about this one., plenty of trolling and countertrolling back then also.

>>5169706
I'm not sure much of it was mean-spirited. Back then trolling was just trying to rile people for giggles. Society is just so divided now that people simply can't tolerate someone disagreeing with them.

>>5166805
80s anime was garbage with a few outstanding exceptions that have stood the test time.

>>5169690
You are a very reasonable person. I hope you come to know God one day, but your position is quite reasonable and you seem pretty logical. My point isn't for you to pick up my religious ideals, but if God does exist, you seem like somebody who would do well receiving from him.

>>5169934
Your point being? The same could be said of every decade, i.e. Sturgeon's Law.

>>5169018
Nice dude, and yeah, I can't blame you, I forced myself to pass up some really fucking sick-looking LD box sets from the movie section of a hard-off I went to in Tokyo, I personally don't need any more rabbit holes to jump into but good for you man. Appreciate your dedication to your hobby.

>>5169026
Thanks for clarifying, that makes sense. I'm between 20 and 29 now, and I didn't have a computer that I was allowed to use online until 2004, so I missed all of this stuff. It's cool to learn about, the piracy talks reminds me of when torrenting used to be mainstream and everyone just grabbed shit off of pirate bay. I haven't torrented in years though, I'm convinced that everything left alive is a honeypot or some kind of malware/bitcoin miner/etc. Guess I'm just lucky to have enough stuff I already own that I don't want for new things.

>>5169932
It's interesting too, internet allows you to easily filter everything so you only see what you like, and what you agree with, and then everyone just does that and no one compares ideas. We wouldn't have as many crazy factions if they didn't all have easy access to one another and to their own echo chambers. Internet is a real double-edged sword in that way.

>>5170543
>I'm convinced that everything left alive is a honeypot or some kind of malware/bitcoin miner/etc.
I wouldn't still subscribe to a usenet server if that was the case
But you can't be stupid - like downloading and running a 1MB file named GrandTheftAutoV.exe

>>5165430
I still use IRC

>>5170739
I wouldn't say stupid, just concerned about people watching. Maybe I'm just paranoid, just the shutdowns of websites got me on edge. But I guess if they really went after torrent users then I'd have been fucked a long time ago, back on demonoid my UL was something like 1TB.

>thread starts out almost mind-blowingly amazing
>turns to off-topic faggotry

ffs guys

>>5166756
Someone should just go through the usenet archives and post random screencaps of random threads.

>>5167978
idk, I remember how they made fun of Bush in every possible way on the internet back then

Being able to download new posts and post your own with a single command was super great. I understand that BBSs could do the same thing.

>>5167978
>the big Internet explosion happened during the Clinton years

Only 5% of people had access to the internet in their place of residence at the end of 1999. It REALLY blew up in 2000, but didn't even come close to being a majority thing until after Bush was in office.

>>5166675
>remember some cunt constantly derailing multiple programming newsgroups with christfag posts
>look at what the groups are like these days
>he's still fucking there
>last christfag post was today

>>5165954
>Everything went better than expected.
Please stay on reddit.

>>5168319
Around here it died simply because the ISPs didn't want to maintain multi-terabyte news servers or be under threat from the law for shit like CP and warez on alt.binaries groups. First the binary groups went, and once they saw the usage decline with the loss of all the warez kiddies they axed everything else for lack of interest.
We lost our local groups for classified ads and until cragislist spread here there was nothing comparable available online.

>>5168637
>Sorry if this is a dumb question, what did "alt" and "rec" mean?
Top level hierarchy was usually maintained by a small group of people and had rules about what sorts of newsgroups and behavior was allowed. "rec" = "recreation" and was created to discuss things like music and TV since most newsgroups initially pertained to business and academia. "alt" = "alternative" and was called such because it was essentially anarchistic and the alternative choice to other top-level hierarchies. If it was illegal or completely unmoderated, the group for it was probably under the alt hierarchy.
>What did people call spaces on Usenet anyway, "boards" or "pages" or something else?
We called them newsgroups, or just groups for short.

>>5169036
There were dozens of newsgroup binary clients and what was most popular varied over time.
Originally people posted uuencoded files and split them by hand. People on the other end likewise stitched them together by hand and ran them through uudecode. Which was a bullshit process even for the smallest 2-part files if you've ever done it more than a couple of times, so it didn't take long for people to put out software for it.
It was also done over FTN networks but to a much lesser extent since hobbyist BBS sysops didn't have much patience for that sort of abuse of their services.

>>5165498
>you needed PAR files to repair them or recreate the missing files
Man, now that brings me back

>>5173881
In 20 years, Gramps still goes on rambling about his love life, his kid and his political ideas and Sevenleaf keeps shitposting pretending he or she is a transsexual if this board still exists by then. Of course, 6th gen except for Dreamcast will still not be allowed but it won't even matter because no one else will still visit this place by then.

>>5169934
the same argument is even more true for 2000s and 2010s anime

>>5174134
More the same argument has been parroted for more than 20 years by people who think all anime sucks at a certain point because they find that not every anime ever made is good.

>>5169678
>>5169932
>>5169706
my recollection doesn't go as far back as usenet, just bulletin boards from the late 90s, but it seemed like there were plenty of mean-spirited trolls to me. By 1999 you definitely had trolls posting goatse just to piss people off.

The big difference I notice between then and now is how sophisticated the clickbait, SEO, and internet psyops has become. There's a line from an old West Wing episode about a story that was "on the internet right now and will be headlines tomorrow morning." Back then, there was no "social media" and the internet wasn't a primary marketing vector. So you didn't have as many shills, false flaggers, SJWs, blue-check twitter types, and now the alt-right deliberately engaging in psychological manipulation and cultural warfare on your favorite forums, and were generally more free to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about so long as it was on-topic for the site.

usenet was once a great place but now it's just a giant dumping ground for spam, binaries and extreme mental illness.

>>5169678
>Also, what ever happened to just regular funny websites like Seanbaby, Something Awful, Old Man Murray, Maddox, Stile Project, etc... usually one man or two at most teams making great content for no real reason other than entertain. That's what it was, old internet was the wild west, now it's "civilized" and boring.

"In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction."
(www.cameronsworld.net)

ATM i can't find the info-graphic illustrating how we've gone from 80% of web traffic to the top 1000 websites a decade ago to 95% of web traffic now going to the top 50 (or however few it actually is now.)

>>5174426
It's true the discussion groups are dead, but the binary groups make it worth the cost for me
It's awesome for retro game roms/images - also movies, tv shows, music, books, magazines, and comics

>>5174692
Honest question, what makes it more awesome than just using the web & torrenting? I rarely even resort to torrenting /vr/ since we have various open-directories of rom collections, multiple free (pirate) GOG mirrors, etc.
For movies, tv shows etc you can grab everything via torrents on public trackers too. Dont know about books, mags and comics as i dont read them on the computer.

>>5175084
This is the one question that seems to stump usenet users - wtf is actually the point anymore?! He'll likely flail around with something like it's faster to get uncommon files, but with specialized torrent sites that's not so true anymore either. The true reason is just nostalgia. Having said that, in the early 2000s I used it for getting unmentionable illegal porn out of curiosity and honestly nothing else is like it for that, that is the only use for it I know of and it's pretty twisted lol.

>>5175084
This is the one question that seems to stump usenet users - wtf is actually the point anymore?! He'll likely flail around with something like it's faster to get uncommon files, but with specialized torrent sites that's not so true anymore either.

>>5175146
>The true reason is just nostalgia. Having said that, in the early 2000s I used it for getting unmentionable illegal porn out of curiosity and honestly nothing else is like it for that, that is the only use for it I know of and it's pretty twisted lol.

You forgot to put this part back.

Newsgroups was apart of Windows' email client for a long time. I was posting to Usenet in 1999 and the early '00s.

South Park and Mortal Kombat specifically.

>>5173758
Internet was best in the late 90s, early 2000s (aka before the launch of the normie phone that fucking ruined everything).

>>5175251
>>5175226
It's bizzare hearing people talk about late 90's & early 2000's usenet. I've been online since '95 and i just never looked at it, i was barely aware it existed other than hearing of 'news groups'. I even logged into a couple BBSs mid 90s out of curiosity, then got my shareware on the WWW, then late 90s discovered warez sites (mostly trash but some good) and some ICQ friends invited me to a private FTP file share. Then i found napster, then got mirc and found DCC. When napster died i used bearshare then kazaa lite, eventually got on some private dc++ hubs, then when torrents came about some private torrent sites early to mid 2000s. Gave up private torrent sites due to autistic ratio crap and been using suprnova/loki/isohunt/pirate bay/whatever flavour-of-the-year torrent site since.

Do i have some uncommonly massive blind spot, or was usenet always a small population of internet users?

>>5175251
Everything was better back before every little faggot started calling everything they don't like "normie"

>>5175268
It used to be fairly influential.

>>5175282
Even as late as the late 90s early 2000s? Was it mainly influential in the early-90s, before my time?

>>5175268
>>5175290
Usenet was massive straight up until the end of the 90s. Even after web-based forums became a thing it remained huge for quite some time just as a forum. And it was particularly useful for pirates because you didn't need money or connections to operate an ftp server or DCC bot. You upload once and the internet providers spread your warez around for you, and even store it locally so their customers have unlimited access to it.
That's some sort of blind spot for sure. From the sounds of it you were confined to http and didn't stray to other protocols until later. Which is weird because generally people progressed the other way around.

>>5175352
>That's some sort of blind spot for sure. From the sounds of it you were confined to http and didn't stray to other protocols until later. Which is weird because generally people progressed the other way around.
No it's not, and no it wasn't, not at all. By the end of the 1990s it was all about the www. Usenet groups made sense when downloading text was a formidable task, the exact same way email clients used to make sense. Plenty of people, if not the majority after ~1997, knew about internet explorer, netscape, solitaire and ms paint and pretty much nothing else.

>>5175084
>what makes it more awesome
I don't know, since I don't torrent. Never tried it. Maybe it's quicker and easier to torrent. I guess I'm just doing what I'm familiar with.

Don't you have to search for exactly what you want when you torrent? I like the way usenet sort of gives me a "list" of what's recently posted.
"Hmm, let's see... I'll take this movie and this tv series and this latest mame rom set and these comics and oh shit "Big-Breasted 18-Year-Olds" might be good (you can view a thumbnail image)."
If I do want something in particular, my usenet provider has 10 year file retention and search, so it's very possible it's available somewhere.

Are there any malware or privacy/security concerns with torrenting? I would argue there are none with usenet (if you only download), with the possible exception of malware if someone is a complete idiot.

Can you request something with torrenting? Many groups will post what you want if you ask nicely.

Do torrents always download at the max speed of your connection? I always get max speed with my usenet provider.

>Dont know about books, mags and comics as i dont read them on the computer
I copy books and comics to a tablet - I do skim through the mags on the computer, as I tend not to read those cover-to-cover.
I've also downloaded thousands of old game manuals and strategy guides. I didn't search for them, I just saw they were available.

The bottom line is I might be stupid for continuing to use usenet, and don't know what I'm missing by not using torrents.

>>5175496
Everything you've described is basically available with torrents. Every torrent tracker ive used lets you browsed by "most recently uploaded" so if you like you can browse the new releases rather than search for something in particular. TV & movie focused trackers even have all sorts of info on top of the normal .nfo stuff, like hooking into rotten tomatoes ratings, preview screenshots available on the webpage (not just in the torrent), etc. Two things you describe which torrents may be inferior at: file retention and speed. Torrent life depends entirely on the torrent and the people who continue to share it when the original seeder leaves. I've downloaded torrents that are 15 years old, but sometimes a rare torrent i want is dead (no seeders) when its only a year or two old. Speed likewise depends on the torrent - its always super fast for anything new/popular, but rare stuff will often only have one or two seeders (who are probably sharing hundreds of other things) so the speed isnt great.

It seems to me that UseNet died because pirates made the entire concept seem toxic in the eyes of the infrastructure that was required to support it.

>>5175146
>wtf is actually the point anymore?
it's a lot more private to use usenet for downloading (c) material, nobody watching whos downloading what. i see a lot of people using it just for that reason alone.
>>5175639
>usenet died
still alive, faggot.
>because pirates made the entire concept seem toxic
had nothing to do with pirates making anything whatever. binary use exploded in growth all round. we're talking about petabytes worth of data and ISPs did not want to pay for the bandwidth or storage.

>>5175496
IMO usenet is great for torrents that are dead with no seeders. That's the problem with torrents, no retention and if no one is seeding, you'll never find the files. Torrenting is good for newer stuff and popular or well known things, but usenet with high retention time is great. Then again, usenet has it's own problems, missing parts, having to repair, finding the missing parts on another provider, etc. For the most part private trackers are the way to go, but getting onto a good one can be a pain in the ass that might take a year or more if you're unlucky.

>>5175754
>still alive, faggot.
In the same way that typewriters and vinyl records are.

>we're talking about petabytes worth of data and ISPs did not want to pay for the bandwidth or storage.
Yeah, of pirated content. The UTZOO tapes are about 2GB of text, so where is all this extra storage coming from? Piracy and porn of questionable legality. Accept some responsibility.

>>5175534
Thanks for the info. Torrent World seems to offer more than I realized. It would be interesting to sit down with a torrent expert and watch them do their thing. Maybe they would find it interesting to sit down with me. I once had a buddy that watched me downloading and he immediately went home and subscribed to a usenet provider. (I say "once", because his wife found out he was cheating on her and shot/killed him. No shit)

I had to answer a lot of questions, though, before he "got gud". There's one of the problems with using the newsgroups. There's a fairly strong learning curve involved. I have the impression that torrenting might be easier for a young person to master.

>>5175759
>usenet has it's own problems, missing parts, having to repair, finding the missing parts on another provider, etc.
Yes, that's possible, but it doesn't happen often enough for me to consider it a problem. But yeah, dealing with par files is part of the learning curve I mentioned earlier. On the rare occasion my provider has missing parts, it usually only takes me a few seconds to repair.

>>5175352
>ftp server

I fucking miss those. SO MANY MP3s downloaded through OLD AS FUCK ftp servers. On dialup that was the only way to get even remotely decent download speed.

>>5175754
>it's a lot more private to use usenet for downloading (c) material, nobody watching whos downloading what. i see a lot of people using it just for that reason alone.
Crazy people maybe. The idea that anyone will try matching your ip address with your name and they would know you. The idea would give the slightest absolute fuck what you download in your own time in the first place or that it would even matter in any way to you if it did. That's batshit insane talk.

>>5176148
You're an idiot if you think people don't still regularly get in legal trouble for that shit. It's WORSE than it was in the napster days.

>>5176596
really depends on your country's law
where the corporations doesn't have complete control of your life violating privacy is a way worse crime than violating copyright

>>5177293
HEY GUYS WE GOT A LAWYER HERE

>>5178872
>HEY GUYS WE GOT AN UNDERAGE HERE
FTFYK