On Saturday, April 21, 2001, at 05:44 PM, Bill Stewart wrote: > At 08:15 PM 04/17/2001 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote: >> A brief data point to add to Bill's interesting post: >> >> I had dinner with someone from alt.net during my not-exactly-voluntary >> visit to the Seattle area recently. He told me (this is from memory) >> that Usenet is now on the order of 300 GB/day and they get a full feed. >> 90 percent is binaries. > > Gakkk.. That's ~27 megabits/second, over half a T3. > I remember when I could *read* all of Usenet, > and later when I could at least print out everything > except net.singles and read it on paper :-) By the way, amongst a group of computer-industry folks I have lunch with regularly, all of them but me Windows 98, NT, ME users, I'm the only one who regularly uses Usenet. Of these five other people, I doubt any of them has _ever_ fired up a newsreader, even the primitive ones built into Explorer and Navigator. When I mention having read or written something on Usenet, they give me basically blank looks. I think they think Usenet is some kind of specialized chat room, like the Silicon Investor Web-based forum that several of them read every day. I think they're not unique. They came to the Net and the Web after many years in the computer business (and prior to about 1992-4, private accounts were not common, and were mostly AOL and Compuserve atrocities, for most people). So by the time these former computer industry folks really got connected, Usenet was already a kind of "relic." (Having looked at some of the fora on Silicon Investor, Raging Bull, and the Yahoo stock messages fora, these Web-based communities are EVEN WORSE than Usenet! One-line repartee is the norm. Just about worthless, in my view.) --Tim May
