On Friday, September 21, 2012 8:44:07 PM UTC-5, wrote:
Glad to know that you're still around. Send me a notice when you do start that new group.

....Actually the Retro Space Images page on Facebook has somewhat already filled that need. Only downside is that a *lot* of those subscribing and following the page are of this "next generation" who've gotten into Teh Intarwebz via Twitter, and seem to think that all posts should be under 140 characters or "u need 2 STFU! ur posts r 2 long 2 reed! LOL!!" Not that I pay one iota of attention to that sort of idiocy, mind you :P

....And there's another upside worth mentioning. Retro's page gives us something that none of the usenet newsreaders I've come across ever gave us: the ability to see images in threads. That was something we all dreamed of when usenet was getting its start in the days when 2400bd was the speed limit unless you were fortunate enough to have direct access to those Big Iron mainframes on campus, and trimming your quotes was something you learned to do by your second post at the risk of your life. Quite a few newsreaders that came soon afterwards included watchdog coding to help prevent full quotes with only one line of comment - mostly to preserve bandwidth, which in those days was a dwindlng global resource, especially after "Eternal September" arrived - but that feature, IIRC, never really got implemented in the usenet readers that ran on Windows. At least not one I came across, and I was using Forte Agent from one of the later beta versions onward.

....Granted, I saw several commercial usenet readers being demoed at the last Windows World in Dallas in...1994?...where the reader could parse UU'd files and create a cludge that would allow it to download those images - just JPGs and BMPs, no other binary downloads possible "so as not to assist in software piracy" as one PR dork said proudly - and show them to you as if they were part of the actual post. You had to post the image to a binary group first using these readers, which would then be able to access that insane reference number all posts are assigned in order to include the "imbeddeed" reference.

Today's kids have it easy compared to what we had to achieve with just stone punches and Hollerith papyrus cards...

OM