🚀 go-pugleaf

 Ned Danieley <ndd@sunbar.mc.duke.edu> wrote:
> In article <2mi2f7$3g5@news.duke.edu> you wrote:
> : As moderator of comp.society.folklore, I'd really like to see some
> : correspondence here in the group about the years of USENET before the
> : renaming.  When all the groups were either net.* or mod.* and the Alt Wars
> : were not even born.
> 
> : Mike Grubb, news admin at Duke University, theorized to me the other day
> : that there's probably only one person still on the net who was posting at
> : the very beginning -- back when there was only one site on the net (Duke
> : University) posting to netnews and there was only one group, general.  In
> : other words, to have been there at the very beginning, you would have to
> : have been at Duke before the link to UNC was established. 
> 
> I suspect there are more than that. Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott are
> still around. there are probably some others who were grad students
> that early; USENET was already fairly extensive (50+) sites when I got
> to Duke in 1980.

Well, there are four folks still actively posting that I know were around
when netnews was invented.   Tom Truscot and Steve Daniel are two.  Myself
and Steve Bellovin (formerly of UNC now at research.att.com) are the other
two.

Names that no longer appear are: Dennis Rockwell, Jim Ellis and David Lupo.

As I recall the first steps it was:
        duke
        duke-unc
        duke:unc:phs
        duke:unc:phs:duke34
        etc....

alice (now research.att.com), decvax and ucbvax  were very early sites, as
was utzoo (and the ubiquitos Henry Spencer :-)

The main problem is that nostalgia tinges the "good old days" with a
sepia tone, and many of the details are no longer as clear as they
once were.

But don't kid yourself.  Flame wars erupted on the net within a month of
its real inception.  I do remember that!