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Ah yes, how many hours I wasted back then on usenet, arguing politics & religion. As well as arguing the merits of text editors & OS's (but I repeat myself).

I used to use the unix "news" program from a command line in the early 80s, and then "tin" replaced it some time in the early 90s with a superior hierarchic UI. Of course, its market share of internet social networking declined once "MOSAIC" and its companion NCSA server came out.

Web search engines like yahoo & altavista were so much faster at finding things then the old usenet way of "go subscribe to these dozen newsgroups, find the official FAQ for each one, and grep through them all for what you want".

Back then we all had email addresses that gave the pathway from your nearest server to ihnp4 (Bell's best-known email backbone node = "Indian Hills Network Processor 4"). So the email looked something like: hpcnd!hpccc!hplabs!ihnp4!.......