Every now and then, I come across a website that reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Take, for example, the computer science professors Brian Kernighan and Donald Knuth. Kernighan’s site is a little more elaborate than Knuth’s. For those who remember the early days of the Internet, Knuth’s site looks pretty close, but both remind…
This is the story of Usenet, an obsession with astronauts, a deep dive into NASA history, a delightful discovery, forgetting that discovery for a quarter century, and my inability to successfully carry out a Google search. This story begins in the 1990s, deep in the bowels of Usenet, which was social media in the days…