Posted 8:19 PM by Floyd

In 1985 I discovered Usenet and read it with a passion. In those days there were a few thousand newsgroups, and not too much traffic. I read news on a terminal, with the Unix rn program. Didja see that? Didja see how I put rn in Courier and you instantly knew it was a Unix command? Those were the days. A friend of mine claimed that he didn't need readers at all; he would go to the /usr/news/usenet subdirectories and read the articles right off the filesystem.

After college my interest trailed off. Around 1993 I stopped reading the newsgroups. But Alta Vista piqued my interest again, and since 1996 or so I have read rec.games.bridge, the sci.space hierarchy, and various political newsgroups.

Usnet contains a lot of cool information, and very knowledgeable denizens like James Donald and Henry Spencer. It also contains a lot of idiots. Recently I began reading alt.fan.harry-potter. I present to you some Subject lines:

Re: Harry Potter and the Lord Of The Rings. I think magic is tied to the Big Bang theory.

I don't respect the opinions of Cartman.

Cartman is not a Harry Potter character, nor is he an alt.fan.harry-potter poster. He is the Cartman you think he is.

Do you all think Hermione could be related to Professor McGonagall

Clearly George Lucas has a lot to answer for.

If somebody actually finds a way to perform witchcraft. Ask Judge Judy?

Al Pacino as Dumbledore

Is Snape a kitten-friend? :-)