Original-author: emv@mail.coast.net (Edward Vielmetti)
Original-date: 26 Dec 1991
Archive-name: usenet/what-is/diff2
Last-change: 22 Sep 1996 by emv@mail.coast.net (Ed Vielmetti)
Changes-posted-to: news.misc,news.admin.misc,news.answers

The following are the differences between two versions.
- indicates lines that were deleted in the new version,
+ indicates lines that were added in the new version.

    ...
 Original-author: emv@mail.coast.net (Edward Vielmetti)
 Original-date: 26 Dec 1991
 Archive-name: usenet/what-is/part2
-Last-change: 15 Feb 1996 by netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
+Last-change: 22 Sep 1996 by emv@mail.coast.net (Ed Vielmetti)
 Changes-posted-to: news.misc,news.admin.misc,news.answers
 
 The periodically posted "What is Usenet?" posting goes:
    ...
 >necessity, among people who are on Usenet.  Imagine, then, how poorly
 >understood Usenet must be by those outside!
 
-Imagine, indeed, how poorly understood Usenet must be by those who
-have the determined will to explain what it is by what it is not?
-    "Usenet is not a bicycle.  Usenet is not a fish."  
-
-Any posting like this that doesn't get revised every few months quickly
-becomes a quaint historical document, which at best yields a
-prescriptivist grammar for how the net "should be" and at worst tries
-to shape how the Usenet "really is".
-
-The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it is big.  Really big.
-Netnews (and netnews-like things) have percolated into many more places
-than are even known about by people who track such things.  There is no
-grand unified list of everything that's out there, no way to know beforehand
-who is going to read what you post, and no history books to guide you that
-would let you know even a small piece of any of the in jokes that pop
+Imagine, indeed, how poorly understood Usenet must have been by those who
+had the determined will to explain what it is by what it is not?
+    "Usenet was not a bicycle.  Usenet was not a fish."  
+
+Any posting like this that hasn't been revised every few months has
+become a quaint historical document, which at best yields a
+faint notion how the net "should have been" and at worst tries
+to shape how the Usenet "really was".
+
+The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it was big.  Really big.
+Netnews (and netnews-like things) had percolated into many more places
+than were even known about by people who tracked such things.  There was no
+grand unified list of everything that was out there, no way to know beforehand
+who was going to read what you post, and no history books to guide you that
+would let you know even a small piece of any of the in jokes that popped
 up in most newsgroups.  Distrust any grand sweeping statements about
 "Usenet", because you can always find a counterexample.  (Distrust this
 message, too :-).
    ...
 >not relevant to Usenet.)
 
 Any essay on the nature of Usenet that doesn't change every so often
-to reflect its ever changing nature is erroneous.  Usenet is not a
+to reflect its ever changing nature is erroneous.  Usenet was not a
 matter of "truth", "beauty", "falsehood", "right", or "wrong", except
-insofar as it is a conduit for people to talk about these and many
+insofar as it was a conduit for people to talk about these and many
 other things.
 
 >WHAT USENET IS NOT
    ...
 
 > 1. Usenet is not an organization.
 
-Usenet is organized.  There are a number of people who contribute
-to its continued organization -- people who post lists of things,
-people who collect "frequently asked questions" postings, people
-who give out or sell newsfeeds, people who keep archives of groups,
-people who put those archives into web servers, people who turn
+Usenet was organized.  There were a number of people who contributed
+to its continued organization -- people who posted lists of things,
+people who collected "frequently asked questions" postings, people
+who gave out or sold newsfeeds, people who kept archives of groups,
+people who put those archives into web servers, people who turned
 those archives into printed books, talk shows, and game shows.
-This organization is accompanied by a certain amount of disorganization
--- news software that doesn't always work just right, discussions
-that wander from place to place, parts of the net that resist easy
-classification.  Order and disorder are part of the same whole.
-
-In the short run, the person or group who runs the system that you read
-news from and the sites which that system exchanges news with control
-who gets a feed, which articles are propogated to what places and how
-quickly, and who can post articles.  In the long run, there are a number
-of alternatives for Usenet access, including companies which can sell you
-feeds for a fee, and user groups which provide feeds for their members;
-while you are on your own right now as you type this in, over the long
-haul there are many choices you have on how to deal with the net.
+This organization was accompanied by a certain amount of disorganization
+-- news software that didn't always work just right, discussions
+that wandered from place to place, parts of the net that resisted easy
+classification.  Order and disorder were part of the same whole.
+
+In the short run, the person or group who ran the system that you read
+news from and the sites which that system exchanged news with controlled
+who got a feed, which articles were propogated to what places and how
+quickly, and who could post articles.  In the long run, there were a number
+of alternatives for Usenet access, including companies which sold you
+feeds for a fee, and user groups which provided feeds for their members;
+while you were on your own right when you typed this in, over the long
+haul there were many choices you had on how to deal with the net.
 
 > 2. Usenet is not a democracy.
 
-Usenet has some very "democratic" sorts of traditions.  Traffic is
+Usenet had some very "democratic" sorts of traditions.  Traffic was
 ultimately generated by readers, and people who read news ultimately
-control what will and will not be discussed on the net.  While the
-details of any individual person's news reading system may limit or
-constrain what is easy or convenient for them to do right now, in the
-long haul the decisions on what is or is not happening rests with the
+controlled what was and wasn't discussed on the net.  While the
+details of any individual person's news reading system limited or
+constrained what was easy or convenient for them to do at the moment, in the
+long run the decisions on what was or wasn't happening rested with the
 people.
 
-On the other hand, there have been (and always will be) people who
-have been on the net longer than you or I have been, and who have a
-strong sense of tradition and the way things are normally done.  There
-are certain things which are simply "not done".  Any sort of decision
-that involves counting the number of people yes or no on a particular
-vote has to cope with the entrenched interests who aren't about to
+On the other hand, there had been (and always will have been) people who
+had been on the net longer than you or I had been, and who had a
+strong sense of tradition and the way things were normally done.  There
+were certain things which were simply "not done".  Any sort of decision
+that involved counting the number of people yes or no on a particular
+vote had to cope with the entrenched interests of those who weren't about to
 change their habits, their posting software, or the formatting of
 their headers just to satisfy a new idea.
 
 > 3. Usenet is not fair.
 
-Usenet is fair, cocktail party, town meeting, notes of a secret cabal,
-chatter in the hallway at a conference, friday night fish fry,
-post-coital gossip, conversations overhead on an airplane, and a bunch
+Usenet was a fair, a cocktail party, a town meeting, the notes of a 
+secret cabal, the chatter in the hallway at a conference, the sounds of
+a friday night fish fry, post-coital gossip, the conversations overhead 
+in an airplane waiting lounge that launched a company, and a bunch
 of other things.
 
 > 4. Usenet is not a right.
    ...
 
 > 5. Usenet is not a public utility.
 
-Usenet is carried in large part over circuits provided by public
+Usenet was carried in large part over circuits provided by public
 utilities, including the public switched phone network and lines
 leased from public carriers.  In some countries the national
-networking authority has some amount of monopoly power over the
-provision of these services, and thus the flow of information is
+networking authority had some amount of monopoly power over the
+provision of these services, and thus the flow of information was
 controlled in some manner by the whims and desires (and pricing
 structure) of the public utility.
 
-Most Usenet sites are operated by organizations which are not public
-utilities, not in the ordinary sense.  You rarely get your newsfeed
-from National Telecom, it's more likely to be National U. or Private
+Most Usenet sites were operated by organizations which were not public
+utilities, not in the ordinary sense.  You rarely got your newsfeed
+from National Telecom, it was more likely to be National U. or Private
 Networking Inc.
 
 > 6. Usenet is not an academic network.
 
-Usenet is a network with many parts to it.  Some parts are academic,
-some parts aren't.  Usenet is clearly not a commercial network like
-Sprintnet or Tymnet, and it's not an academic network like BITNET.
-But parts of BITNET are parts of Usenet, though some of the traffic on
-Usenet violates the BITNET acceptable use guidelines, even though the
-people who are actually on BITNET sites reading these groups don't
-necessarily mind that they are violating the guidelines.
+Usenet was a network with many parts to it.  Some parts were academic,
+some parts weren't.  Usenet was clearly not a commercial network like
+Sprintnet or Tymnet, and it was not an academic network like BITNET.
+But parts of BITNET were parts of Usenet, though some of the traffic on
+Usenet violated the BITNET acceptable use guidelines, even though the
+people who were actually on BITNET sites reading these groups didn't
+necessarily mind that they were violating the guidelines.
 
-Whew.  Usenet is a lot of networks, and none of them.  You name
-another network, and it's not Usenet.
+Whew.  Usenet was a lot of networks, and none of them.  You name
+another network, and it's wasn't Usenet.
 
 > 7. Usenet is not an advertising medium.
 
    ...
 CAR?"  The crowd stands up and shouts back, "WRONG THEATER!"
 
 Ever since the first dinette set for sale in New Jersey was advertised
-around the world, people have been using Usenet for personal and for
-corporate gain.  If you're careful about it and don't make people mad,
-Usenet can be an effective means of letting the world know about
+around the world, people had been using Usenet for personal and for
+corporate gain.  If you were careful about it and didn't make people mad,
+Usenet was an effective means of letting the world know about
 things which you find valuable.  But take care...
 
-- Marketing hype will be flamed immediately.  If you need to post a
+- Marketing hype was flamed immediately.  If you needed to post a
   press release, edit it first.
-- Speak nice of your competitors.  If your product is better than
-  theirs, don't say theirs is "brain damaged", "broken", or "worthless".
-  After all someone else might have the same opinion of your product.
+- Speak nice of your competitors.  If your product was better than
+  theirs, you didn't say theirs is "brain damaged", "broken", or "worthless".
+  After all someone else might have had the same opinion of your product.
 - Dance around the issue.  Post relevant information (like price, availability
-  and features) but make sure you don't send everything out.  If someone
-  wants the hard sell let them request it from you by e-mail.
-- Don't be an idiot.  If you sell toasters for a living, don't spout off
+  and features) but make sure you didn't send everything out.  If someone
+  wanted the hard sell let them request it from you by e-mail.
+- Don't be an idiot.  If you sold toasters for a living, you didn't spout off
   in net.breadcrumbs about an international conspiracy to poison pigeons
-  orchestrated by the secret Usenet Cabal; toaster-buyers will get word
-  of your reputation for idiocy and avoid your toasters even if they are
+  orchestrated by the secret Usenet Cabal; toaster-buyers got word
+  of your reputation for idiocy and avoided your toasters even if they were
   the best in the market.
-- Disclaimers are worthless.  If you post from foobar.com, and put a note
-  on the bottom "not the opinions of foobar inc.,", you may satisfy the
-  lawyers but your corporate reputation still will be affected.  To maintain
-  a separate net.identity, post from a different site.
+- Disclaimers are worthless.  If you posted from foobar.com, and put a note
+  on the bottom "not the opinions of foobar inc.,", you may have satisfied the
+  lawyers but your corporate reputation was still affected.  To maintain
+  a separate net.identity, you posted from a different site.
 
 > 8. Usenet is not the Internet.
 
-It would be very difficult to sustain the level of traffic that's
-flowing on Usenet today if it weren't for people sending news feeds
+It was very difficult to sustain the level of traffic that was
+flowing on Usenet back then if it weren't for people sending news feeds
 over dedicated circuits with TCP/IP on the Internet.  That's not
-to say that if a sudden disease wiped out all RS/6000s and Cisco
-routers that form the NSFnet backbone, CIX hub, and MAE East
-interconnect, that some people wouldn't be inconvenienced or cut
+to say that if a sudden disease had wiped out all RS/6000s and Cisco
+routers that formed the NSFnet backbone, CIX hub, and MAE East
+interconnects, that some people wouldn't be inconvenienced or cut
 off from the net entirely.  (Based on the reliability of the MAE
-East, perhaps the "sudden disease" has already hit?)
+East, perhaps the "sudden disease" already hit?)
 
-There's a certain symbiosis between netnews and Internet connections;
-the cost of maintaining a full newsfeed with NNTP is so much less
-than doing the same thing with dialup UUCP that sites which depend
-enough on the information flowing through news are some of the most
+There was a certain symbiosis between netnews and Internet connections;
+the cost of maintaining a full newsfeed with NNTP was so much less
+than doing the same thing with dialup UUCP that sites which depended
+enough on the information flowing through news were some of the most
 eager to get on the Internet.
 
-The Usenet is not the Internet.  Certain governments have laws which
-prevent other countries from getting onto the Internet, but that
-doesn't stop netnews from flowing in and out.  Chances are pretty good
-that a site which has a Usenet feed you can send mail to from the
-Internet, but even that's not guaranteed in some odd cases (news feeds
+The Usenet was not the Internet.  Certain governments had laws which
+prevented other countries from getting onto the Internet, but that
+didn't stop netnews from flowing in and out.  Chances were pretty good
+that a site which had a Usenet feed could send mail to you from the
+Internet, but even that was not guaranteed in some odd cases (news feeds
 sent on CD-ROM, for instance).
 
 > 9. Usenet is not a UUCP network.
 
 UUCP carried the first netnews traffic, and a considerable number
-of sites get their newsfeed using UUCP.  But it's also fed using
+of sites got their newsfeed using UUCP.  But was also fed using
 NNTP, mag tapes, CD-ROMs, and printed out on paper to be tacked up
 on bulletin boards and pasted on refrigerators.
 
    ...
 
 A 1991 analysis of the top 1000 Usenet sites showed about 58% US
 sites, 15% unknown, 8% Germany, 6% Canada, 2-3% each the UK, Japan,
-and Australia, and the rest mostly scattered around Europe.  Things
-have no doubt changed since then, but I don't have that data close
-at hand.
+and Australia, and the rest mostly scattered around Europe. 
 
-The state of California is the center of the net, with about 14% of
-the mapped top sites there.  The Washington, DC area is also the center
+The state of California was the center of the net, with about 14% of
+the mapped top sites there.  The Washington, DC area was also the center
 of the net, with several large providers headquartered there.  You
-can read netnews on all seven continents, including Antarctica.
+could read netnews on all seven continents, including Antarctica.
 
-If you're looking for a somewhat less US-centered view of the world,
-try reading regional newsgroups from various different states or
-groups from various far-away places (which depending on where you are
-at could be Japanese, German, Canadian, or Australian).  There are a
-lot of people out there who are different from you.
+If you were looking for a somewhat less US-centered view of the world,
+you could have tried reading regional newsgroups from various different 
+states or groups from various far-away places (which depending on where 
+you are at could be Japanese, German, Canadian, or Australian).  There were a
+lot of people out there who were different from you.
 
 >11. Usenet is not a UNIX network.
 
-Well...ok, if you don't have a UNIX machine, you can read news.  In
-fact, there are substantial sets of newsgroups (bit.*) which are
+Well...ok, if you didn't have a UNIX machine, you could read news.  In
+fact, there were substantial sets of newsgroups (bit.*) which were
 transported and gatewayed primarily through IBM VM systems, and a set
-of newsgroups (vmsnet.*) which has major traffic through DEC VMS
-systems.  Reasonable news relay software runs on Macs (uAccess), Amiga
+of newsgroups (vmsnet.*) which had major traffic through DEC VMS
+systems.  Reasonable news relay software ran on Macs (uAccess), Amiga
 (a C news port), MS-DOS (Waffle), and no doubt quite a few more.  I'm
 was typing on a DOS machine when I first wrote this sentence, and it's
 been edited on Macs and X terminals since then.
 
-There is a certain culture about the net that has grown up on Unix
-machines, which occasionally runs into fierce clashes with the
-culture that has grown up on IBM machines (LISTSERV), Commodore
+There was a certain culture about the net that grew up on Unix
+machines, which occasionally ran into fierce clashes with the
+culture that had grown up on IBM machines (LISTSERV), Commodore
 64's (B1FF 1S A K00L D00D), MS-DOS Fidonet systems, commercial chat
 systems (America Online), and "family oriented" systems (Prodigy).
-If you are not running on a Unix machine or if you don't have one
-handy there are things about the net which are going to be puzzling
-or maddening, much as if you are reading a BITNET list and you
+If you were not running on a Unix machine or if you didn't have one
+handy there were things about the net which were puzzling
+or maddening, much as if you were reading a BITNET list and you
 don't have a CMS system handy.
 
 >12. Usenet is not an ASCII network.
 
-There are reasonably standard ways to type Japanese, Russian, Swedish,
-Finnish, Icelandic, and Vietnamese that use the ASCII character set to
+There were reasonably standard ways to type Japanese, Russian, Swedish,
+Finnish, Icelandic, and Vietnamese that used the ASCII character set to
 encode your national character set.  The fundamental assumption of
-most netnews software is that you're dealing with something that looks
-a lot like US ASCII, but if you're willing to work within those bounds
-and be clever it's quite possible to use ASCII to discuss things in
+most netnews software was that you're dealing with something that looks
+a lot like US ASCII, but if you were willing to work within those bounds
+and be clever it was quite possible to use ASCII to discuss things in
 any language.
 
 >13. Usenet is not software.
 
-Usenet software has gotten much better over time to cope with the ever
+Usenet software had gotten much better over time to cope with the ever
 increasing aggregate flow of netnews and (in some cases) the extreme
-volume that newsgroups generate.  If you were reading news now with
-the same news software that was running 10 years ago, you'd never be
-able to keep up.  Your system would choke and die and spend all of its
-time either processing incoming news or expiring old news.  Without
-software and constant improvements to same, Usenet would not be here.
-
-There is no "standard" Usenet software, but there are standards for
-what Usenet articles look like, and what sites are expected to do with
-them.  It's possible to write a fairly simple minded news system
+volume that newsgroups generated.  If you had been reading news then with
+the same news software that was running 10 years previous, you'd never have
+been able to keep up.  Your system would have choked and died and spent all 
+of its time either processing incoming news or expiring old news.  Without
+software and constant improvements to same, Usenet would not have been.
+
+There was no "standard" Usenet software, but there were standards for
+what Usenet articles looked like, and what sites were expected to do with
+them.  It was possible to write a fairly simple minded news system
 directly from the standards documents and be reasonably sure that it
-will work with other systems, though thorough testing is necessary if
-it's going to be used in the real world.  You should not assume that
-all systems have been tested before they have been deployed.
+will work with other systems, though thorough testing was necessary if
+it was going to be used in the real world.  You did not assume that
+all systems were tested before they have been deployed.
 
 >WHAT USENET IS
 >--------------
 
-Usenet is in part about people.  There are people who are "on the
-net", who read rec.humor.funny every so often, who know the same jokes
-you do, who tell you stories about funny or stupid things they've
-seen.  Usenet is the set of people who know what Usenet is.
+Usenet was in part about people.  There were people who were "on the
+net", who read rec.humor.funny every so often, who knew the same jokes
+you did, who told you stories about funny or stupid things they'd
+seen.  Usenet was the set of people who knew what Usenet was.
 
-Usenet is a bunch of bits, lots of bits, millions of bits each day
+Usenet was a bunch of bits, lots of bits, millions of bits each day
 full of nonsense, argument, reasonable technical discussion, scholarly
 analysis, and naughty pictures.
 
-Usenet (or netnews) is about newsgroups (or groups).  Not bboards,
+Usenet (or netnews) was about newsgroups (or groups).  Not bboards,
 not LISTSERV, not areas, not conferences, not mailing lists, they're
-groups.  If someone calls them something else they're not looking
-at things from a Usenet perspective.  That's not to say that they're
+groups.  If someone called them something else they were not looking
+at things from a Usenet perspective.  That's not to say that they were
 "incorrect" -- who is to say what is the right way of viewing the
-world? -- just that it's not the Net Way.  In particular, if they
+past? -- just that it was not the Net Way.  In particular, if they
 read Usenet news all mixed in with their important every day mail
-(like reminders of who to go to lunch with Thursday) they're not
-seeing netnews the way most people see netnews.  Some newsgroups
-are also (or "really") Fidonet echoes (alt.bbs.allsysop), BITNET
+(like reminders of who to go to lunch with Thursday) they were not
+seeing netnews the way most people saw netnews.  Some newsgroups
+were also (or "really") Fidonet echoes (alt.bbs.allsysop), BITNET
 LISTSERV groups (bit.listserv.pacs-l), or even both at once!
-(misc.handicap).  So be prepared for some violent culture clashes
-if someone refers to you favorite net.hangout as a "board".
+(misc.handicap).  So there were some violent culture clashes
+when someone referred to you favorite net.hangout as a "board".
 
-Newsgroups have names.  These names are both very arbitrary and very
-meaningful.  People will fight for months or years about what to name
-a newsgroup.  If a newsgroup doesn't have a name (even a dumb one like
-misc.misc) it's not a newsgroup.  In particular newsgroup names have
-dots in them, and people abbreviate them by taking the first letters
-of the names (so alt.folklore.urban is afu, and soc.culture.china is
+Newsgroups had names.  These names were both very arbitrary and very
+meaningful.  People fought for months or years about what to name
+a newsgroup.  If a newsgroup didn't have a name (even a dumb one like
+misc.misc) it wasn't a newsgroup.  In particular newsgroup names had
+dots in them, and people abbreviated them by taking the first letters
+of the names (so alt.folklore.urban was afu, and soc.culture.china was
 scc).
 
 >DIVERSITY
 >---------
 
-There is nothing vague about Usenet.  (Vague, vague, it's filling up
+There was nothing vague about Usenet.  (Vague, vague, it was filling up
 millions of dollars worth of disk drives and you want to call it
-vague?  Sheesh!)  It may be hard to pin down what is and isn't part of
-Usenet at the fringes, but netnews has tended to grow amoeba-like to
+vague?  Sheesh!)  It may be hard to pin down what was and wasn't part of
+Usenet at the fringes, but netnews tended to grow amoeba-like to
 encompass more or less anything in its path, so you can be pretty sure
-that if it isn't Usenet now it will be once it's been in contact with
+that if it wasn't Usenet then it will be once it's been in contact with
 Usenet for long enough.
 
-There are a lot of systems that are part of Usenet.  Chances are that
-you don't have any clue where all your articles will end up going or
+There are a lot of systems that were part of Usenet.  Chances were that
+you didn't have any clue where all your articles will end up going or
 what news reading software will be used to look at them.  Any message
 of any appreciable size or with any substantial personal opinion in it
-is probably in violation of some network use policy or local ordinance
+was in violation of some network use policy or local ordinance
 in some state or municipality.
 
 >CONTROL
 >-------
 
-Some people are control freaks.  They want to present their opinion of
-how things are, who runs what, what is OK and not OK to do, which
-things are "good" and which are "bad".  You will run across them every
-so often.  They serve a useful purpose; there's a lot of chaos
+Some people were control freaks.  They wanted to present their opinion of
+how things were, who ran what, what was OK and not OK to do, which
+things were "good" and which were "bad".  You ran across them every
+so often.  They served a useful purpose; there was a lot of chaos
 inherent in a largely self-governing system, and people with a strong
-sense of purpose and order can make things a lot easier.  Just don't
-believe everything they say.  In particular, don't believe them when
-they say "don't believe everything they say", because if they post the
-same answers month after month some other people are bound to believe
+sense of purpose and order made things a lot easier.  Just don't
+believe everything they said.  In particular, don't believe them when
+they sad "don't believe everything they said", because if they posted the
+same answers month after month some other people were bound to believe
 them.
 
-If you run a news system you can be a petty tyrant.  You can decide
+If you ran a news system you could be a petty tyrant.  You could decide
 what groups to carry, who to kick off your system, how to expire old
-news so that you keep 60 days worth of misc.petunias but expire
-rec.pets.fish almost immediately.  In the long run you will probably
-be happiest if you make these decisions relatively even-handedly since
+news so that you kept 60 days worth of misc.petunias but expired
+rec.pets.fish almost immediately.  In the long run you would probably
+have been happiest if you made these decisions relatively even-handedly since
 that's the posture least likely to get people to notice that you
-actually do have control.
+actually did have control.
 
-Your right to exercise control over netnews usually ends at your
+Your right to exercise control over netnews usually ended at your
 neighbor's spool directory.  Pleading, cajoling, appealing to good
-nature, or paying your news feed will generally yield a better
+nature, or paying your news feed generally yielded a better
 response than flames on the net.
 
 
 >PERIODIC POSTINGS
 >-----------------
 
-One of the ways to exert control over the workings of the net is to
+One of the ways to exert control over the workings of the net was to
 take the time to put together a relatively accurate set of answers to
-some frequently asked questions and post it every month.  If you do
-this right, the article will be stored for months on sites around the
-world, and you'll be able to tell people "idiot, don't ask this
+some frequently asked questions and post it every month.  If you did
+this right, the article was stored for months on sites around the
+world, and you'd be able to tell people "idiot, don't ask this
 question until you've read the FAQ, especially answer #42".
 
-The periodic postings include several lists of newsgroups, along with
-comments as to what the contents of the groups are supposed to be.
-Anyone who has the time and energy can put together a list like this,
-and if they post it for several months running they will get some
+The periodic postings included several lists of newsgroups, along with
+comments as to what the contents of the groups were supposed to be.
+Anyone who had the time and energy could have put together a list like this,
+and if they had posted it for several months running they would get some
 measure of net.recognition for themselves as being the "official"
 keeper of the "official" list.  But don't delude yourself into
-thinking that anything on the net is official in any real way; the
-lists serve to perpetuate common myths about who's talking about what
-where, but that's no guarantee that things will actually work out that
+thinking that anything on the net was official in any real way; the
+lists served to perpetuate common myths about who was talking about what
+where, but that was no guarantee that things actually worked out that
 way.
 
 
 >PROPAGATION
 >-----------
-In the old days, when it cost real money to make long distance
+In the real old days, when it cost real money to make long distance
 phone calls to send netnews around the world, some people were
 able to get their management to look the other way when they
 racked up multi-thousand dollar phone bills.  These people were
    ...
 influence on news traffic because, after all, they were managing
 to get someone else to pay for it.
 
-Nowadays, communications costs are (for many sites) buried in with
-a general "internet service".  If you want to have a disproportionate
-influence on news traffic, you need to be able to beg, borrow, buy or
-steal access to great big disk drives (so that you can keep a full
-feed) and lots of memory (so that you can feed a lot of sites at once).
+More recently, communications costs were (for many sites) buried in with
+a general "internet service".  If you wanted to have a disproportionate
+influence on news traffic, you needed to be able to beg, borrow, buy or
+steal access to great big disk drives (so that you could keep a full
+feed) and lots of memory (so that you could feed a lot of sites at once).
 
-There is a vigorous, competetive cash market for news feeds; you
-can get a newsfeed from a local provider via modem or via Internet
+There was a vigorous, competetive cash market for news feeds; you
+could get a newsfeed from a local provider via modem or via Internet
 in all 50 states of the USA, more than 50 countries, and via
 satellite in most of North America.  The notion that any one system
-is a "pre-eminent site" is outdated; communications costs have
+was a "pre-eminent site" was past; communications costs had
 gotten low enough, and traffic high enough, that if any one node
-were to get wiped out completely it would still be possible for
+were to have gotten wiped out completely it would have still been possible for
 everyone to be back on the net within weeks.
 
 >NEWSGROUP CREATION
 >------------------
-You're better off starting up a mailing list.  
+You were better off starting up a mailing list.  
 
-If you *must* start a newsgroup, you're best off starting a mailing
+If you *had to* start a newsgroup, you were best off starting a mailing
 list anyway - even an informal one - to plan the newsgroup.  Get
 a half dozen people to all agree on the basic goals, topics of
 conversation, etc.  Figure that you have about two months to agree
 that there's something worth talking about, get a hundred other people
 to see your way, and run the vote.
 
-There are time-honored rituals for newsgroup creation, designed 
+There were time-honored rituals for newsgroup creation, designed 
 mostly to minimize the amount of work that news administrators
 (the people who have managed to corral a bunch of disk space to
-store news) have to do; in particular, this involves minimizing
-the number of mail messages they have to read every day.  The
-process involves handing off responsibility to a group of people
-well-steeped in ritual (the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers) who can
-run through the process for you.
+store news) had to do; in particular, this involved minimizing
+the number of mail messages they had to read every day.  The
+process involved handing off responsibility to a group of people
+well-steeped in ritual (the Usenet Volunteer Votetakers) who 
+ran through the process for you.
 
 >THE CAMEL'S NOSE?
 >-----------------
 I'm not sure what camels have to do with anything.  The only real
-camel that has anything to do with Usenet is Larry Wall and Randal
+camel that had anything to do with Usenet is Larry Wall and Randal
 Schwartz's "Programming perl", aka the "Camel Book", published by
 O'Reilley.  Larry wrote "rn", one of the second generation of news
 readers that let you ignore some news that you didn't want to read.
    ...
 He never finished the new newsreader, though that's not at all 
 surprising.  "perl" is a pretty useful language, though.  If you
 can understand "perl" you'll have a much greater appreciation for
-the ability of news admins to get rid of things they don't want to
+the ability of news admins to get rid of things they didn't want to
 see.
 
-There are easily $12M worth of computers that I can point to that
-are responsible for the transportation of netnews around the world,
+There are easily $12M worth of computers that I could have pointed to that
+were responsible for the transportation of netnews around the world,
 plus another $12M per year in communications bills spent to keep
-news flowing.  Much has been made of the risk that miscreants will
+news flowing.  Much was made of the risk that miscreants would
 do something horrendous that will mean The Death Of The Net As We
-Know It.  It seems unlikely, however, that this collective enterprise
-will be endangered by any one user's actions, no matter how bold
+Knew It.  It seems unlikely, however, that this collective enterprise
+would be endangered by any one user's actions, no matter how bold
 they might be about trying to propogate their message against the
 collective will of the rest of the net trying to keep them in check.
+Was was surprising was how the success of the net became indistinguishable
+from its failure.
 
 >IF YOU ARE UNHAPPY...
 >---------------------
    ...
   philosophy is far more realistic.
   				     -- Adam Engst
 
+Copyright 1996 Edward Vielmetti.  All rights reserved.
+
+
--
