Introduction:
Welcome to The Great Renaming FAQ. The problem
with most FAQs is they are too long and are often unreadable.
One should be able to print out a FAQ and read it over
dinner. Thus this FAQ intends to give a concise, readable
history of the 1986 Great Renaming of Usenet. The origins
of the now mythical Usenet Cabal and the great "comp.women" debacle
are also touched on. Although much of what happen so long
ago has been lost in the mists of time, or become mythology,
this FAQ hopes to be as accurate as possible.
Disclaimer(s):
The format of this FAQ takes a inspiration
from David
DeLaney's Net.Legends
FAQ, 2nd Ed. Thus the FAQ's are not written, but alluded
to. This FAQ answers the 5W&H of The Great Renaming and
the Backbone Cabal. This information in this FAQ comes
from a collection of posts and email the author has collected.
Much of its content comes from a November
1994 thread in comp.society.folklore. Also a large number
of holes were pluged after I read a great history of the
culture of the Net by Henry Edward Hardy [ftp://umcc.umich.edu/pub/users/seraphim/doc/nethist8.txt].
This document is not entirely original, with some words
coming from the sources because they gave a better explanation.
Send all links, flames, faint praise or just a hello to Lee
S. Bumgarner. Also, make sure to stop by his weblet [http://media2.jmu.edu/users/leebumgarner/homepage.html]
while you are here. (Note, there may be a few spelling
mistakes that I've not caught yet.)
The Great Renaming FAQ:
In The Beginning...
According to the Net.Legends FAQ, Usenet's
collective memory lasts about a fortnight. Thus most people
know little or nothing about where Usenet came from or
how it got where it currently is. Given the seemingly never
ending stream of new users, and the drop out or burn out
of older readers, the earlier years of Usenet are starting
to take on mythological qualities. Yet Usenet can only
understand where it is going unless it knows where its
been. This history deals with events immediately before
the Great Renaming and ends with the death of the Backbone
Cabal, and hopes to tell what really happen during Usenet's
more traumatic experiences.
The years between the creation of the Unix
User Network in 1979 and the Great Renaming of 1986 were
ones of great growth for Usenet. Over the years, a large
enough group of core sites were organized and linked together
to give most of North America access to Usenet.
During these early ye would aars of Usenet,
UUCP [http://cs.weber.edu/home/rlove/HTML/uucp.html],
a point-to-point connection protocol was Usenet's only
communication method. NNTP [http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp.html],
whichllow news traffic over ARPAnet [http://web.kaleida.com/u/hopkins/arpanet/arpanet.html],
(Internet's forefather) had yet to become widely used.
The two systems were connected, but not as interdependent
as Internet and Usenet are today.
Instead of looking to the user as an amorphous
blob, Usenet had the form of a graph (in the graph-theory sense). "Network
maps" were produced from time to time which looked like this.
(The machine names are real, but the connections are drawn
at random.)
UUCP/USENET Logical Map - June 1, 1981 / mods by S. McGeady 11/19/81
(ucbvax)
+=+===================================+==+
| | | |
| | wivax | |
| | | | |
| | microsoft| uiucdcs | |
| | genradbo | | | | | | (Tektronix)
| | | | | | | purdue | |
| decvax+===+=+====+=+=+ | | | |
| | | | | | | pur-phy | | tekmdp
| | | | | | | | | | |
+@@@@@@cca | | | | | | | | |
| | | | +=pur-ee=+=+=====+===+ | |
| csin | | | | | |
| | +==o===+===================+==+========+=======+====teklabs=+
| | | |
| | | pdp phs grumpy wolfvax |
| | | | | | | |
| | cincy unc=+===+======+========+ |
| | | bio | |
| | | (Misc) | | (Misc) |
| | | sii reed | dukgeri duke34 utzoo |
| | | | | | | | | |
| +====+=+=+==+====++======+==++===duke=+===+=======+==+=========+ |
| | | | | | | | | | u110
| bmd70 ucf-cs ucf | andiron | | | | |
| | | | | | |
| red | | | | | pyux
| | | | zeppo | | | |
| psupdp---psuvax | | | | | | |
| | | | alice | whuxlb | utah-cs | | houx
| allegra | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | +--chico---+
| +===+=mhtsa====research | /=+=======harpo=+==+ | |
| | | | | | / | | |
| hocsr | | +=+=============+=/ cbosg---+ | |
| ucbopt | | | | | esquire |
| : | | | cbosgd | |
| : | | | | |
| ucbcory | | eagle==+=====+=====+======+=====+ | |
| : | | | | | | | | | +-uwvax--+
| : | | | mhuxa mhuxh mhuxj mhuxm mhuxv | |
| : | | | | |
| : | | | +----------------------------o--+
| : | | | | |
| ucbcad | | | ihpss mh135a |
| : | | | | | |
| : \--o--o------ihnss----vax135----cornell |
| : | | | | |
+=+==ucbvax==========+===+==+=+======+=======+=+========+=========+
(UCB) : | | | | (Silicon valley)
ucbarpa cmevax | | menlo70--hao
: | | | |
ucbonyx | | | sri-unix
| ucsfcg1 |
| | |
Legend: | | sytek====+========+
------- | | | |
- | / \ + + Uucp sdcsvax=+=======+=+======+ intelga zehntel
= "Bus" | | |
o jumps sdcarl phonlab sdcattb
: Berknet
@ Arpanet
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now the thing is that on such a diagram you can choose to emphasize
a set of lines forming a path through the hosts -- say "utzoo - decvax
- seismo - ihnp4". The "backbone" was simply a group of hosts whose
admins agreed to form such a connected set, and to devote whatever
resources were necessary to carry all the Usenet traffic and to pass
it on promptly (rather than, say, waiting for overnight when their
machine was less busy, as other sites often did). Orginially organized
by Gene
Spafford [http://www.shadow.net/~proub/net.legends/spaf.html] in
1983 , the backbone was formalized by Spaf after the Great Renaming.
Most
posts arriving on any given machine had
a backbone site in its path, because it was simply more likely to
arrive earlier via the backbone than via any other link. Without
the backbone, news would be i ncredibly delayed or just expire before
it could be transmitted. This indeed happen at times when one of
the key sites -- e.g. "ihnp4", through which almost 100% of the news
flowed from west cost to east cost --went down.
A lot of people got feed because of the
generosity of decvax (Bill Shannon and Armando Stenttner)
and other sites. A Usenet feed depended greatly on who
you knew and your phone budget.
The mythological "Usenet Cabal," which is
often referred to jokingly in passing was originally the "Backbone
Cabal." The Cabal was a group of site admins and their
close friends who participated in a mailing list created
to encourage stable news and mail softare. Nearer the Great
Renaming, the approval of the Cabal was essential to the
creation of a new newsgroup because of how the system was
set up.
Return to Top of Page
A Net.God Gets Irritated
By 1986, Usenet had outgrown its original
set up and it started to experience growing pains. .The
original scheme of just three worldwide hierarchies ---
net.* for unmoderated groups, mod.* for moderated groups
and fa.* for from ARPAnet --- and the fairly haphazard
way in which new names were developed was becoming difficult
to ad minister.
The setup was bugging one particular net.god,
future UUnet [http://www.alter.net/] founder
Rick Adams. Adams, site admin for "seismo," at the Center
for Seismic Studies [http://www.css.gov/] in northern Virginia,
was powerful for a number of reasons. Among them was its
status as the
only link between the US and Europe.
Transmitting news was quite expensive in
those days, so the Europeans refused to pay for the fluff
groups like net.religion and net.flame. Thus the discussion
on the Great Renaming began. According to a post by Joe
Buck, Adams proposed a "talk" hierarchy for the high flame
groups. (As the GR progressed, it was generally understood
that if a group was put in talk.* instead of soc.* it would
not be as widely propagated.)
According to Buck, "The idea was that he
could simply put '!talk' in the configuration file for
each connected site that didn't want these groups," After
Adams threaten to stop participating in Usenet altogether
due to resistance to his idea, the Backbone Cabal was given
the job of the Great Renaming.
The Great Renaming started July 1986 and
ended in March 1987, according to Henry Edward Hardy's
history. Among the people involved with the initial discussion
on the mailing list were Chuq von Rospach and Gene Spafford.
There was some concern that the Backbone Cabal, which was
made up of a small group male computer experts in their
20's and 30's, would be deciding the newsgroups for the
entire, div erse Usenet community. The Cabal and their
cronies often reiterated a magic phrase: "Usenet works
by the golden rule: whoever has the gold, makes the rules." This
was their way of saying they weren't going to pay the long-distance
transmission charges for groups they didn't like.
Much of the debate centered on ways in which
the wider Usenet community could somewhat support the backbone
financially, so everyone could keep getting the groups
they wanted. In the end, no one thought anything like that
would work. Various people also proposed schemes for cutting
down volume.
As the Great Renaming progressed, a current
list of proposed new newsgroups was posted to net.news
several times along the way. However, protests by a few
vocal people forced changes. So under the direction of
the Cabal the Great Renaming happen.
The current comp, misc, news, rec, sci,
soc, talk, (local) was created. Yet ironically, nothing
really changed for a significant portion of sites, and
almost all the sites except company ones still got a full
feed. The connectivity, modem baud rates, stora ge capacity,
etc improved so dramatically that very few university and
public-access sties dropped the soc.* talk.* and later
alt.* groups. For a few years after the GR, however these
groups were not transmitted to Europe, although that changed
after NNTP .
So the major effect of the Great Renaming
was just to organize the groups better. Since the community
in question was Usenet, there was bound to be some disagreement
over the proposed general renaming of groups.
Return to Top of Page
The Birth of Alt.*
At some point, Net.Legend Brian
Reid [http://www.research.digital.com/nsl/people/reid/bio.html],
a member of the Cabal decided he didn't like how things
were going. So he John Gilmore and Gordon
Moffett discussed the creation of an "Alternet" over
dinner on May 7, 1987 at G.T's Sunset Barecue in Mount
View California. An "alternative" distribution system
was organized by this group that didn't use the "backbone" links.
A new top-level hierarchy name "alt.*" was created for
this distribution. In Henry Edward Hardy's history, Reid is
quoted as saying:
John's home computer was "hoptoad";
my home computer was "mejac". We set up a link between
us, and each of us set up a link to amdahl, and we vowed
to pass all alt traffic to each other and to nurse the
net along. In those days one sen t out numerous newgroup
messages in the hopes that one would "take"; by the end
of May the groups alt.test, alt.config, alt.drugs, and
alt.gourmand were active. At the time I also managed "decwrl",
so I quietly added "alt" to the list of groups that it
carried.
Reid created the first alt.* group, alt.gourmand ,
because the Cabal wanted to put his recipe group under
rec.food.* Gilmore objected the Cabal's dropping of net.flame
and the refusal to create rec.drugs. (Moffett just wanted
to help.) Alt.drugs was also
been created around this time. (One of the big debates
of the Great Renaming had been whether there should be
a "drugs" newsgroup *anywhere,* This putative newsgroups
was the example people used of a group that sysadmins would
not be able to convince their bosses to support.)
Nearly a year later there was the rec/soc.sex
debate This was the attempted creation of a sex group that
caused alt.* to take off. There was a lot of sex-related
traffic being carried in soc.singles at the time, so when Richard
Sexton jokingly suggested a alt.sex and alt.rock-n-roll the
afternoon of April 3, 1988. Reid sent the following to
the Backbone Cabal when he did it:
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.
-taken from Henry Edward Hardy's Internet
History.
Return to Top of Page
The Death of the Backbone Cabal
A number of simultaneous events rendered
the Backbone Cabal irrelevant. The most important was the
increase use of NNTP around this same time. Usenet's use
of Internet made it easer to ignore what the news admins
thought. Acording to Reid [http://reid.org/brian/],
the Backbone started to decline when he and Richard
Sexton snuck the site "gryphon.com" into the backbone.
It was arranged to get "gryphon," a 386 PC in Greg Laskin's
living room in Los Angeles, to get news feed from "famous
and important (NASA JPL)" backbone sites and thus put into
the official backbone map.
Also, the new procedures set up after the
Great Renaming led to a challenge by "readers" against
the "privileged" positions of the admins. Early in Usenet's
life, one could create a group simply by posting to it,
and a number of groups were created because of typos. Later
a new group would be created after a subject had sufficient
traffic on an existing group. Then backbone folks would
figure out the name and create it. The Cabal was strongest
right before the Great Renaming: backbone sites refused
to carry groups they considered stupid.
The new procedure went something like this,
according to Greg Woodbury. Someone proposed a newsgroup
and then the Cabal talked about the potentials of/for the
new group. The Cabal defined a name for the group, and
asked for the views of other admins a bout the group and
then finally if the group name was good enough they would
create the group. The original system eventually became
the proposal and "vote" scheme. Holding votes was a way
to make people shut up if a group was unpopular.
The current voted format was laid down around
right before the Great Renaming, but not used until 1987.
Once the voting mechanism was in place, the individual
opinions of the backbone-site admins no longer mattered
much..
Lastly, Usenet's changing make up was involved.
Adams was given a loan by USENIX to set up a non-profit
Usenet site. Eventually this became UUnet and thus as a
commercial entity existing to distribute news, had every
reason _to_ carry all of alt.*.
Return to Top of Page
V. The Last Days: The Great "comp.women" debacle
During the Cabal's last days, its death was quicken by "comp.women" debacle,
as it was later known. In summer, 1988, a newsgroup for woman
was proposed. Its creation became the subject of a massive
flame war because its supporters wanted to put it in the
comp.* groups because this would insure a better propagation.
Opponents noted that this hierarchy was devoted to far more
technical things. After *much* discussion someone created
a "comp.society.woman" out of exasperation. This person got
a great deal of flamage for doing so, but the group came
to life after it was created.
About a month or so later, the backbone having gone almost
entirely silent, Spaf announced he was going to shut it down,
it had become silent because very few people were using dialup
UUCPnet links anymore. A few months after _that_, it was
observed that the list had become /dev/null. The Backbone
Cabal was dead, and the "Usenet Cabal" myth was born.
Return to Top of Page
Thanks
Many thanks to the following, for without them this thing would
not exist:
James "Kibo" Parry [http://www.shadow.net/~proub/net.legends/kibo.html],
kibo@world.std.com, David Lawrence (tale@uunet.uu.net), ebrandt@cs.hmc.edu
bet@std.sbi.com, jgd@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (John G Dobnick),
bengtl@maths.lth.se "Bengt
Larsson, jpc@hammer.msfc.nasa.gov (J. Porter Clark), Gregory
G. "Wolfe" Woodbury, (ggw@cds.duke.edu), msb@sq.sq.com (Mark
Brader) Ed.Falk@Eng.Sun.COM (Ed Falk), jgd@alpha1. csd.uwm.edu
(John G Dobnick), tgl@netcom.com (Tom Lane), Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu
shore@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore), glenn@access.digex.net
(D. Glenn Arthur Jr.), msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader), atkinson@sundance.itd.nrl.navy.mil
(Ran Atkinson), twilson@netcom.com (Tom Wilson), jmaynard@admin5.hsc.uth.tmc.edu
(Jay Maynard), jamie@cs.sfu.ca (jamie andrews), Henry Edward
Hardy seraphim@umcc.umich.edu
About the Author:
Lee S. Bumgarner, a jr at James Madison
University, decided to write this FAQ because he felt Usenet
had come to a point in its history where it needed to look
back on where its been, to better understand where its going.
He also hopes this FAQ's format and style will be used as the
basis for A Reader's Guide to Usenet
History and Culture. It would be a guide to Usenet life
for and by Usenet readers. This Guide would replace this Current
Net.Legends FAQ. (c) copyright Lee S. Bumgarner. Feel free
to send it to anyone and everyone you feel would be interested,
at not cost. Like anyone would want to do anything with this!
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