Deals.Woot

alt.wesley.die.die.die

lol...haven't thought about that in years. To answer your question, no. Not since the late '90s. Other services started popping up that offered the same thing for free.

I started using usenet newsgroups in early 1994 and only gave them up when my favorite group finally became so overrun with spam it was almost unreadable and when we were infested by a mentally ill woman who could easily dump 300 posts a day and changed names every few days.

I loved my "home" group. We actually set up a "diplomatic corps" of folks willing to play tour guide or dinner partner to visiting group posters. Over the years I had the opportunity to visit with folks in or from 15 or more states and half a dozen non-US countries. I'm still in touch with several of them, albeit now on a very small private mail-list.

We managed to move our group from the Wild West of alt.* to avoid 1996 spam onslaught and get ourselves into one of the Big Seven, which meant we could create a charter that sysadmins would enforce. For the next several years we had expert netcops, but it eventually just couldn't be managed.

I really love your post; it brings back a lot of wonderful memories!

I used to use newsgroups when my ISP included free access. Sadly the free access disappeared.

@dawgdave99: I never used either of those programs, I trusted files from Usenet to be less likely to contain viruses. My girlfriend's kid infected her computer twice from using Limewire. The first time I had to reformat and the second time required a new hard drive. I do use uTorrent sometimes now but I always run everything through AVG & Malwarebytes before opening.

@magic cave: hey, how about that! Not that I deserve it, the way I was running around here last night like a bull in a china shop! I appreciate the advice several people gave me to just chill and become part of the community. I can do that and should have known better, anyway.

@woadwarrior: a lot of ISPs were giving free (albeit limited) Usenet access there for awhile. I had free access from Adelphia before they went all Enron and got eaten up by Time-Warner. I could only access about half the newsgroups and there were lots of incomplete files on the binary groups I was able to access so never did give up my Giganews account.

@chipgreen:

I remember when I got my 28.8 modem... it was the fourth modem I owned and replaced a 14.4, which had replaced a 2400, which had replaced a 1200 (I never owned a 300 baud modem though I used a borrowed one before the 1200).

The Hayes Smartmodem 1200 cost me $603 (dealer cost plus shipping). I wonder what happened to it... I know we were using it as a door stop at work (literally) but I'm not sure what happened to it after that. Probably got tossed.

I would definitely use them if I still had access to a quality free service. Unfortunately both my ISP (Verizon FiOS) and my alma mater stopped offering them. In the case of my alma mater, it was probably 10 years ago when they stopped providing them free of charge to alumni. Verizon shut theirs down, I think 2 or 3 years ago.

There are plenty of pay services, but with a little effort, you can get almost anything you can get on usenet from other sources.

As for useless old technologies.... I remember when bonding of dial-up connections became possible. I bought a CompuCom (I think that was the company) dual MODEM for a small fortune and tied up both telephone lines downloading for virtually 12 hours every night. Thankfully our telephone lines had been grandfathered in to the one price for all intra-lata included calls b/c at the time those plans were no longer being offered.