Passed away October, 2016.
Steven Den Beste's profile (website)
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Name: Steven Den Beste
Joined: February 26, 2000
Joined: February 26, 2000
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About
What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
I started using Usenet in 1979 when a PDP-11/45 running Unix V7 where I worked was wired into other computers at the corporation which were in turn connected to the outside world. In those days Usenet did most of its communication with dial-up connections between hosts.
Remember bang-address lists, anyone? There was no DNS, so to get email to someone you had to do your own routing. People signed their addresses with a route from a well-known large central site such as UCB. To get your system connected to Usenet, you had to find a computer already in the system and beg its owner for the privilege of logging in several times per day for up and download. Connection speed was low and traffic levels were very light (by modern standards but huge compared to anything before). It was a start. The fundmental connection software was UUCP because TCP/IP was exclusively used on the ARPANET.
The killer app then was netnews: the world's largest computerized bull session. When the Internet came along, it was a natural step for me since it made the stuff I'd already been doing much faster. Usenet simply moved away from dialup modems to persistent connections, and the DNS made manual routing a thing of the past. Which is why you don't see "ucb!tektronix!dad-laa!stevendb" any more, and good riddance.
Usenet was the beginning of whimsical connection names. In a more famous example, when Chico State University (Chico, CA) went online they called their first computer "chico". The second and third machines got called "harpo" and "groucho".
...or at least that's what I thought I was. Now I'm shocked (shocked!) to learn that I'm actually a bank of Sun servers running Oracle. (Not even the dignity of DB2. Bummer.)
I started using Usenet in 1979 when a PDP-11/45 running Unix V7 where I worked was wired into other computers at the corporation which were in turn connected to the outside world. In those days Usenet did most of its communication with dial-up connections between hosts.
Remember bang-address lists, anyone? There was no DNS, so to get email to someone you had to do your own routing. People signed their addresses with a route from a well-known large central site such as UCB. To get your system connected to Usenet, you had to find a computer already in the system and beg its owner for the privilege of logging in several times per day for up and download. Connection speed was low and traffic levels were very light (by modern standards but huge compared to anything before). It was a start. The fundmental connection software was UUCP because TCP/IP was exclusively used on the ARPANET.
The killer app then was netnews: the world's largest computerized bull session. When the Internet came along, it was a natural step for me since it made the stuff I'd already been doing much faster. Usenet simply moved away from dialup modems to persistent connections, and the DNS made manual routing a thing of the past. Which is why you don't see "ucb!tektronix!dad-laa!stevendb" any more, and good riddance.
Usenet was the beginning of whimsical connection names. In a more famous example, when Chico State University (Chico, CA) went online they called their first computer "chico". The second and third machines got called "harpo" and "groucho".
...or at least that's what I thought I was. Now I'm shocked (shocked!) to learn that I'm actually a bank of Sun servers running Oracle. (Not even the dignity of DB2. Bummer.)