"Emery Davis" in . ..
| Thanks for the history Max! ... in '87 or so when I first
| started lurking around usenet, the alt-dot hierarchy was
| known mostly for being disreputable.

"Was?" ;-) ;-) More below, but I'll follow your narrative flow.

You may then have witnessed the remarkable birth of the "alt." newsgroup
hierarchy (after a dinner in May 87) via Brian Reid and associates. Reid's
motivation for the new utterly unconstrained hierarchy concerned cooking (I
reprised it here in June 04). alt.drugs appeared after much debate, then
Reid's creation of alt.sex and his posting April 3, 1988:

"That meant that the alt network now carried alt.sex and
alt.drugs. It was therefore artistically necessary to create
alt.rock-n-roll, which I have also done. I have no idea what
sort of traffic it will carry. If the bizzarroids take it over I
will rmgroup it or moderate it; otherwise I will let it be."


The incongruity of the wine newsgroup's transplant from rec.food to the
alt.* hierarchy is that some people still find alt.* disreputable and with
reason. A respected food-wine poster, who would bring much to this
newsgroup, told me that the US university where he teaches blocked alt.*
because of certain binary photo material with perceived legal risks to the
institution, and that other institutions have done likewise. I did point
out that he can read it indirectly, via Web pages. I know that some people
can testify to various positives on the alt.* newsgroups but this negative
is hardcore. As it were.


| When we moved to France in '90, few here had
| even heard of the internet; France telecom informed
| us that the worlds largest network was "transpac"

In 1980-83 I happened to moonlight editing an engineering trade publication
and tracked certain trends. (Such as the announcement that the
computer-networking protocols developed among grant recipients from a large
US research funding agency, DARPA, would change the moniker from "ARPAnet"
to "ARPA Internet" -- 1980 or so -- that's when the famous name began.) But
in those days, the French national "TeleTex" initiative promised
text-over-phone in homes, with special terminals; a bold independent project
with, I believe, France telecom as a major operator. This no doubt
subordinated interest in other countries' computer networks, rapidly
evolving themselves anyway. On April 1, 1984 in a breakthrough episode,
Piet Beertema, a Netherlands networking engineer who'd struggled to get
co-operation across the Atlantic for higher bandwidth, staged a practical
joke with forged UUCP paths from the Kremlin. I posted on the 20th
anniversary a summary of this "Kremvax" caper and sequelae -- the Kremlin
sys admin actually named a first networking machine Kremvax, honoring
Beertema -- archived currently he

http://tinyurl.com/4zo5j


| Alt-dot has come along way from those heady days! <g|

Yes, it has pictures! :-]

--Max