Having seen the creation of some early newsgroups in the 1980s, I recently
posted recollections of one of them (rec.food.cooking, originally net.cooks)
by request of that site's FAQ keeper. That posting ("Origins of this
newsgroup and other online food fora") can be found on rec.food.cooking
[with undistorted internal Message-ID references], or archived, for example
currently he

http://tinyurl.com/c8vbe

It might possibly be of interest to current readers that AFW derives from
the same source as rec.food.cooking does. Here is a terse summary.


net.wines was successfully proposed by Charles Wetherell February 1982 as a
spin-off from net.cooks (George Otto I believe posted the first "wine"
posting without waiting for that, on net.cooks itself). Launched 27 Feb 82,
a month after net.cooks, and with a wide charter for beverages, and
Wetherell's comment "During the poll, I did receive a request that new
recipes for obscure cocktails be limited." How relevant that advice later
proved! (Obscure and grotesque cocktails were repetitive in the late 80s.)
In late 86 net.wines became rec.food.drink (RFD) in the same Great Renaming
that also renamed net.cooks as rec.food.cooking (RFC). There was discussion
off and on about the scope and future of RFD, with evident consensus for
forming specialty newsgroups as volume grew. This did later occur for beer,
coffee, and tea. However, by chance and without apparently troubling to be
aware of any of this, an impatient short-term participant brought into
existence a separate wines newsgroup in the "alt." hierarchy, alt.food.wine
.. (At that time, late 93 and early 94, I and presumably other older
participants were not active, or we might possibly have steered it back to
plan, which was rec.food.drink.wine). For a period, there were two
competing wine newsgroups, RFD and AFW. Eventually the volume shifted to
AFW. This all coincided with the exploding public interest in networked
computers after the Mosaic web browser in 1993. Good people subsequently
discovered AFW and set themselves up as regulars. By active participation
they manage to achieve a higher standard of exchange than can be found on
some moderated HTTP wine sites now. Albeit with the glaring incongruity in
newsgroup naming: three of four specialty beverage groups under "rec." as
they always were, and the fourth, one of the largest and actually oldest,
under "alt."

-- Max Hauser

Thanks Max.

I'm glad you stopped well before Rosaphilia.

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 11:45:39 -0700, "Max Hauser" > said:

] Having seen the creation of some early newsgroups in the 1980s, I recently
] posted recollections of one of them (rec.food.cooking, originally net.cooks)
] by request of that site's FAQ keeper. That posting ("Origins of this
] newsgroup and other online food fora") can be found on rec.food.cooking
] [with undistorted internal Message-ID references], or archived, for example
] currently he
]
[snip interesting post]

Thanks for the history Max! Thought I'd mention that back in '87 or so when
I first started lurking around usenet, the alt-dot hierarchy was known mostly
for being disreputable. One well known electronic romance between an
east coast employee of a certain workstation manufacturer, later bought
by HP, and a west coast company known for oscilloscopes, began on
alt.sex and was chronicalled (including off-group emails) by an unsavory
postmaster at one of the afore-mentioned. When this made the rounds,
we began to see some of the hidden potentials of the internet! Of course,
this was all pre-web. 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" and we had to hijack access through
a chemistry professor friend's account at Jussieu. :/

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

-E

--
Emery Davis
You can reply to
by removing the well known companies

"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

Was TeleTex the same thing as MiniTel, or was it a predecessor?

- Chris

Max Hauser wrote:

>> . (At that time, late 93 and early 94, I and presumably other older
>participants were not active, or we might possibly have steered it
back >to plan, which was rec.food.drink.wine). For a period, there were
two >competing wine newsgroups, RFD and AFW. Eventually the volume
shifted >to AFW. This all coincided with the exploding public interest
in >networked computers after the Mosaic web browser in 1993. Good
people >subsequently discovered AFW and set themselves up as regulars.
By >active participation they manage to achieve a higher standard of
>exchange than can be found on some moderated HTTP wine sites now.
>Albeit with the glaring incongruity in newsgroup naming: three of four
>specialty beverage groups under "rec." as they always were, and the
>fourth, one of the largest and actually oldest, under "alt."


I was posting to rec.food.wine in 1991 when the first proposal for
alt.wine was raised by someone in England. In the late fall of 1992
the newsgroup had hardly anything except discussions of a new group.
There were already two subgroups of red.food.drink at the time (and
I don't remember them now ) but there was constant argument why we
should not have a new group. Finally in February 1993 we were doing a
very informal vote which someone might have kept track of but the anti-
new group group won. Among us disenchanted types we constantly talked
about a new group all spring. One of the big draw backs was the name.
Alt.oenophiles was proposed ( and I think that it was proposed by the
same guy that had proposed alt.wine two years earlier )to keep the non
serious fans out. Finally one of my cohorts at Cray Research up in
Beaverton, OR sent out a message on July 4,1993 announcing the new group
as alt.wine.I believe that Dean Tudor sent the second message
congratulating the group. And here it is 12 years later. So how did you
vote Max?

On 11 Jul 2005 12:57:29 -0700, "Chris Sprague" > said:

] Was TeleTex the same thing as MiniTel, or was it a predecessor?
]

Chris,

Minitel is the terminal, TeleTex is what it displays -- a sort of protocol,
I imagine. The whole thing is referred to as "the minitel" and still
exists.

[Max wrote]

] 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

It remains to be said, though, that the minitel
was a brilliant invention, largely diffused, and solved many problems
of fully distributed web-based commerce. Most importantly, because
it is based on a kiosque system (all billing centralized through FT) there
was never any security problem for payment. And of course FT made
bushels of francs!

Now, I don't wax nostalgic for the minitel (I don't even have one any more)
but since the terminals were free it had a huge penetration. We used it
-- dragging us kicking and screaming back on topic -- in the early 90s
to order wine delivered to the appartment, bought train tickets, consulted
movie schedules etc; all well before the web existed.

I believe it is thanks to the minitel that the French are currently so far
behind at using web commerce. They already had something that worked
pretty well, so they had no compelling reason to switch.

-E
--
Emery Davis
You can reply to
by removing the well known companies

"Pantheras" in ink.net...
> Max Hauser wrote:
> [group-division debate in early 1990s]
> So how did you vote Max?

I wasn't reading it during the interval when that happened (as I mentioned
in passing in the nutshell history) and therefore missed the debate in the
early 90s about spinning off a specialty group from rec.food.drink ("RFD,"
the original, the foundation, renamed from net.wines in 1986). Some of that
exchange is in the Google archive now, though unfortunately that archive is
weak and unrepresentative for wine newsgroup traffic from the late 1980s to
early 1990s (for the same reason I cited on the longer history note in
rec.food.cooking), though those were good times for the wine newsgroup
(RFD): a period of thoughtful and durable exchanges. (Some are archived
privately FWIW.)

Few people would dispute I think, in the long view, that a specialized wine
newsgroup was justified, once volume was enough. (Circa 87-88, volume was
certainly not enough, even though RFD was still mostly about wine. That is
why I objected to making the group moderated in 87, I assumed it would not
encourage traffic.) The problem, I believe, is that when the split did
occcur later, the long view was in short supply. Evidently there were
differences about when to split. Keep in mind that RFD came into existence
chiefly as a wine newsgroup and had long carried lots of wine traffic,
whether or not every vocal newbie bothered to become aware of that. In
1986-90, solidarity between wine consumers, wine makers, home brewers, beer
connoisseurs, and even students from fraternities with the latest highly
marketed dyspeptic cocktail, all contributed to traffic that made the group
worthwhile. As the volumes of users grew, I gather that the debates about
splitting began in earnest, though I saw very little of that when I was
reading even as late as 1991 and early 92. When the split did occur, it took
characteristically anarchic Usenet form, policy-by-impatience. The right
thing to do was to spin off wine traffic as long expected, under the name
rec.food.drink.wine, just like

rec.food.drink.beer
rec.food.drink.coffee
rec.food.drink.tea

I gather that some people resisted this in the debates circa 1993. Given
that reality, the right thing, I believe, was to be patient, and do the
spinoff a bit later. The wrong thing was to jump over to the alt.*
hierarchy (where it was much easier to create newsgroups at whim). People
who'd been participating off and on for a decade would have had no problem
with patience, I believe; but they were not the ones active on the newsgroup
at the time. According to what I've read post-facto in archives, the person
who launched and/or popularized the alt.* incarnation did not hang around to
participate in it. (Characteristically.) Meanwhile there were other
effects: Two parallel, overlapping wine newsgroups for an extended interval
afterwards (unexplained to newcomers) -- RFD and AFW. And even a few
doddering old-timers (such as me) who looked back later into what had long
been "the wine newsgroup," RFD, as everyone presumably knew; saw little
activity and none of it on wine; found no specialized wine newsgroup in the
obvious place in the newsgroup hierarchy (adjacent to r.f.d.beer,
r.f.d.coffee, r.f.d.tea), and moved on elsewhere. I have talked to other
older participants with same impression ("Oh, the wine newsgroup? Didn't it
go away or something?")

-- Max (Posting to "or something.")

Jim C. wrote:

> If the university wants to filter out photos, they actually need to
> block all newsgroups with 'binaries' in the hierarchy (most fall within
> the alt.binaries.* hierarchy). If users post binaries to non-binaries
> groups, they are very quickly taken to task for it and dealt with by
> their provider if they're a repeat offender. This is just as true of
> the alt.* groups as it is of rec.*, comp.*, sci.*, etc, groups. And the
> university is doing a disserve by blocking many quality alt.* groups
> such as this one.
>
> It sounds like the university's computer department is either ignorant
> of how newsgroups work or dealing with a lot of politics & red tape.

My thoughts exactly, Jim. All of the common NNTP server software (DNews
and INN, primarily) include complex filtering schemes such that they
could easily block *.binaries.* or alt.binaries.* In fact, completely
blocking alt.* sounds like nothing more than prejudice.

Mark Lipton