X-Nico

24 unusual facts about USENET


Alma Alexander

In addition to her fantasy novels, Alexander has published a memoir about growing up in Africa and an epistolary novel (written with her husband, then an acquaintance from a Usenet newsgroup) about the NATO war in Yugoslavia.

Andries Brouwer

In December 1984, while at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), he made the first public release of Hack on Usenet.

Antiprocess

There are many instances on the Internet where antiprocess can be observed, but the prime location to see it is in Usenet discussion groups, where discussions tend to be highly polarized.

Arnie Lerma

Lerma was the first person to post the court document known as the Fishman Affidavit, including the Xenu story, to the internet via the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.

Baseball Think Factory

The site's emphasis on sabermetric baseball analysis attracted members of the rec.sport.baseball Usenet groups, and later drew readers of Rob Neyer's ESPN columns.

Buschwhacker

The term originated in an argument Craig Witkowski had with another user "Tinadog" in the Usenet newsgroup rec.autos.sport.NASCAR in May 1997.

Clay Davenport

DT's were first published by Davenport on the rec.sports.baseball Usenet site in 1995, before Baseball Prospectus was founded.

Computational sociology

Electronic records such as email and instant message records, hyperlinks on the World Wide Web, mobile phone usage, and discussion on Usenet allow social scientists to directly observe and analyze social behavior at multiple points in time and multiple levels of analysis without the constraints of traditional empirical methods such as interviews, participant observation, or survey instruments.

Danny Yee

Starting in 1992 via email, in 1993 via Usenet, and especially with their subsequent publication on the World Wide Web, Yee's mostly self-published reviews are widely consulted by readers evaluating book titles.

Eye Weekly

The content was first posted online via Usenet in March 1994, and its website launched in October 1994, becoming one of the first publications to put its content online.

Forté Internet Software

Originally Forte Advanced Management Systems, Forté Internet Software makes Agent, a Windows-based Usenet news and email client.

Half-width kana

Since the SMTP and NNTP protocols (used to deliver e-mail and Usenet, respectively) were formerly only able to transmit 7-bits, it was then the convention to use ISO-2022-JP for sending e-mail in Japanese.

James Berardinelli

Starting in 1993, Berardinelli started publishing reviews in Usenet by reviewing Scent of a Woman.

James Masterton

Masterton began posting his weekly comments about the latest singles chart on Usenet in 1992, while a student at Lancaster University, whence he graduated in 1994.

Kevin Robert Elz

Usenet hierarchy from its inception in the 1980s until the mid-1990s.

Liaden universe

Unbeknownst to them the books had caused such a stir on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written that they were added to the group's FAQ.

Matt Drudge

They were distributed as an e-mail newsletter and posted to alt.showbiz.gossip Usenet forum.

Niilo Paasivirta

In addition to the Usenet and Paasivirta's own home page, the essays have been published on a web page called Bittivuoto.net, and a computer magazine called Enter.

Project Laurens Janszoon Coster

It was started on June 14, 1995, although before that time a project collecting public domain works was already running on Usenet.

Provinces of New Zealand

The Usenet Internet discussion system for New Zealand "Very roughly they correspond to the boundaries of the 14 Regional

Robert B. Weide

Writing under the pseudonym Wyaduck (a Marx Brothers reference), Weide was a frequent poster to Usenet group alt.books.kurt-vonnegut, where he reported on the progress of the Mother Night project, as well as his being mentioned in Vonnegut's Timequake.

Shane Atkinson

Atkinson was tracked down by anti-spam collaborators on the Usenet news.net-admin newsgroups.

Thallium poisoning case of Zhu Ling

Her symptoms were posted to the Internet via a Usenet newsgroup by her friend from Peking University, Bei Zhicheng and was subsequently proven to be thallium poisoning.

Vampire number

Vampire numbers first appeared in a 1994 post by Clifford A. Pickover to the Usenet group sci.math, and the article he later wrote was published in chapter 30 of his book Keys to Infinity.


Brad Templeton

The name "Emily Postnews" is a pun, referring first to Emily Post, a self-appointed expert on social etiquette and second, to the postnews program, an early piece of Usenet client software.

CPAN

Distributions on the CPAN are divided into 24 broad chapters based on their purpose, such as Internationalization and Locale; Archiving, Compression, And Conversion; and Mail and Usenet News.

Egosurfing

Kibozing - prior to the existence of search engines, a similar practice existed on Usenet, known as kibozing after James "Kibo" Parry, who was well known for replying in a surreal fashion to anyone who mentioned his/her name, on any newsgroup.

Emily Post

Brad Templeton — who posted Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on netiquette on Usenet

Kibo

An alias of James Parry, who as "Kibo" became a cult figure on Usenet in the early 1990s for posting a large number of humorous messages

Mark Horton

Mary Ann Horton (formerly Mark R. Horton, born 1955), Usenet and Internet pioneer

MSTing

MSTing began in the early 1990s, as fans of the show, many of whom were involved in Usenet discussions in groups such as popular MST3K newsgroup rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, began adding amusing or critical remarks to others' posts, attributing them to the show's characters (typically, Crow T. Robot, Tom Servo, Joel Robinson, and later Mike Nelson).

Revenge porn

Two decades later, Italian researcher Sergio Messina, identified “realcore pornography,” a new genre consisting of images and videos of ex-girlfriends distributed through Usenet groups.

Services menu

In its developer documentation, Apple recommends that applications use services to provide features that are "generally useful", giving as an example a Usenet client providing ROT13 encryption as a service.

Steve Gilliard

Earlier in his career, Gilliard was threatened with legal action by representatives of Rosie O'Donnell when he "wrote something about Rosie leering at Peta Wilson, the tall, very blonde, very bosomy star of the La Femme Nikita series." He responded that if sued, he would post the responses to his discovery on Usenet.

Usenet II

Usenet II was a proposed alternative to the classic Usenet hierarchy, started in 1998.

Version 8 Unix

V8 is perhaps best remembered for its regular expression (RE) matching library, which was subsequently reimplemented by Henry Spencer, who distributed his version via Usenet.

Zippo Manufacturing Co. v. Zippo Dot Com, Inc.

Zippo Dot Com (“Dot Com”), a California corporation, operated an internet web site that offered access to USENET newsgroups.