| Part 1
In the 20 odd years of its existence a rich culture has evolved around
the use of the Net. Over the years, silent battles have been won and lost
outside the awareness of the rest of the world. For years, the only disruption
to the Net's culture was the yearly influx of clueless newbies in September
caused by thousands of college freshmen discovering the Net for the first
time. Eventually these newbies assemilated in the general Net.Culture.
Sometime in 1993 this changed. Large numbers of people who knew little
or nothing about Net.Culture started to use it, in numbers far exeeding
the ablity of oldbies to control them.The widespread use of Frequently
Asked Questions lists was largely the result of this inrush.
Among one of the more important events to take place during this "Golden
Age" of Usenet was the Great Renaming. After all was said and done,
we were left with, for the most part, the current organization of groups
that we know today. Although much of what is known about the 1986-87 Great
Renaming of Usenet is lost to the mists of time, this FAQ hopes to give
some insight into the events surrounding it. This document's format take
inspiration from David DeLaney's seminal Net.Legends FAQ, 2nd Ed. ( And
will make more sense if you read it first) Thus the actual 5W&H are
alluded to rather than written.
One should be able to download, print out and read this FAQ over dinner.
Thus this FAQ hopes to give a concise, readable history of the events around
the Great Renaming. Things interlinked with the Great Renaming, like the
orgins of the mythical Usenet Cabal and the great " comp.women"
debacle are also explained. This FAQ sources are a November 1994 thread
in comp.society.folklore, email to the author,
Henry Edward Hardy's study of net.culture and an article in the Net.
Send all links, flames, faint praise or just a hello to Lee
S. Bumgarner. Also, if you are reading this due to a link, make sure to
stop by the rest of Undertoad while you are here.
Apparently, the first time anything like Usenet was ever used was during
the price and wage controls of the early 70's. It was a way for the government
to make sure all the controls were uniform. However, it would not be until
the late 70's that Usenet was actually born. Usenet was created in late
1979 as the Unix User Network when Duke University graduate students, Tom
Truscott and Jim Ellis, decided to connect computers together in order
for the Unix community to communicate. The first two sites were "unc"
and "duke," computers another graduate student Steve Bollovin
had installed his news software on. From this point word spread and Usenet
began to grow quickly.
Usenet in the early 80's was an obscure computer network made up of
academics and Unix users. At least one AT&T employee seems to have
though it was owned by them, because one source reported a post saying
something about a light in the AT&T parking lot. According to Tom Geller
in the Net Magazine, the first three newsgroups were net.general, net.v7bugs
and net.test. The old system could be the possible origin of Usenet's other
name, "netnews." It didn't take long, however, for non-technical
newsgroups to show up, and this eventually caused problems.
The mythological "Usenet Cabal," often referred to jokingly
during debates over new newsgroups, actually existed in the form of the
"Backbone Cabal." Gene "father of the Backbone" began
a listserv in 1983 made up of group of site admins and their close friends
devoted to encouraging stable news and mail software. The Cabal's power
came from the technology Usenet was using at the time. During these early
years of Usenet, UUCP, a point-to-point connection protocol, was Usenet's
only communication method. NNTP, which would allow news traffic over ARPAnet,
(Internet's foremother) had yet to become widely used. Although the systems
were connected, they were not as interdependent as Internet and Usenet
are today.
Usenet had the form of a graph (in the graph-theory sense). "Network
maps" were produced from time to time. (See appendix.) Eventually
huge Postscript files were made showing how big Usenet had gotten. On such
a diagram you can choose to emphasize a set of lines forming a path through
the hosts. Usenet's "backbone" was simply a group of hosts whose
admins agreed to form such a connected set. They further agreed to to devote
whatever resources were necessary to carry all the Usenet traffic and to
pass it on promptly.
Other, non-backbone, sites might wait until night, when their machines
were less busy, to pass news along. During these early years, a news feed
depended greatly on who you knew. A lot of people got feed because of the
generosity of Bill Shannon and Armando Stenttner who ran "decvax"
at Digital (DEC). During its heyday, the average post arriving on any given
machine would likely have been sent through a Backbone computer, because
the backbone enabled it to arrive quicker than any other link. Without
the Backbone, Usenet propagation would be incredibly delayed or just expire
before it could be transmitted. This actually happened when a key site
like the AT&T machine in Naperville, IL, known as "ihnp4",
through which almost 100% of news flowed from the West Coast went down.
By 1986, Usenet was experiencing some growing pains. The original scheme
of just three worldwide hierarchies - net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.*
for moderated groups and fa.* for 'from ARPAnet' - was becoming difficult
to administer. The fairly haphazard way in which new names were developed
- at one point one could create a group simply by posting to it (several
were created due to typos) - only made things worse. (This haphazard scheme
frequently still exists for local newsgroups.)
Things came to a head when one particular net.god, future UUnet founder
and Bill Gates pal Rick Adams, decided something must be done. Adams, site
admin for "seismo," at the Center for Seismic Studies in northern
Virginia, was powerful for a number of reasons. Among them was seismo's
status as the only link to Europe from the US.
The Great Renaming discussion began in part because transmitting news
was quite expensive in those days and the Europeans refused to pay for
the fluff groups like net.religion and net.flame. According to a post by
Joe Buck, Adams proposed a "talk" hierarchy for the high flame
groups. As the Great Renaming discussion progressed, it was generally understood
that if a group was put in talk.* instead of soc.* it would not be as widely
propagated. According to Buck, "The idea was that he could simply
put '!talk' in the configuration file for each connected site that didn't
want these groups."
According to the soc.culture.jewish FAQ, the group's name is an example
of this. Orginally "net.religion.jewish," it was generally believed
during the Great Renaming discussion that renaming it "talk.religion.jewish"
would be detrimental to the group's success. This problem was solved by
proposing the group be placed in the soc.culture.* hierarchy.
Due to Usenet's structural conservatism, Adams had to threaten to pull
out of Usenet altogether before people took notice. Thus, through default,
the task of the Great Renaming was given to the Backbone Cabal. The Great
Renaming started July 1986 and ended in March 1987, according to Henry
Edward Hardy's history. Spaf and fellow net.legend Chuq von Rospach (the
author of "A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community")
were among the people involved with this initial discussion on the mailing
list.
Some worried that the Backbone Cabal, which was made up of a small group
of male computer experts in their 20's and 30's, would be deciding the
newsgroups names for the entire, diverse Usenet community. In responce,
the Cabal and its cronies often reiterated a magic phrase: "Usenet
works by the golden rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules."
In other words, they would refused to pay the long-distance transmission
charges for groups they didn't like. Matthew P Wiener, (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu),
remembers differently. "Actually, they were quite reasonable about
the whole thing," he posted.
Much of the debate centered on ways in which the wider Usenet community
could somewhat support the backbone financially, so everyone could keep
getting the groups they wanted. In the end, no one thought anything like
that would work. Also, various people also proposed schemes for cutting
down volume but that, too, was thought unlikely to work.
As the Great Renaming discussion progressed, a current list of proposed
new newsgroups was posted to net.news several times along the way. However,
protests by a few vocal people forced "a dozen or two dozen changes
made from the original lists.changes," according to Wiener. One of
the big debates of the Great Renaming had been whether there should be
a "drugs" newsgroup *anywhere*; this putative newsgroup was the
example people used of a group that sysadmins would never be able to convince
their bosses to support. Usenet at the time was a very low key affair and
Sysadmins feared drawing any undue attention to Usenet in general. They
feared if their bosses became aware of a drug newsgroup, it would mean
the end of their Usenet feed altogether.
According to Wiener, "Years and years before (early '80s), there
had been a similar debate about net.gay. After a long and bitter debate,
the famous net.motss compromise was reached. The rec.drugs debate sparked
some creative names."
In any event, under the direction of the direction of the Cabal, the
Great Renaming happened and comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, talk, setup
was created.
On To Part 2/5
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