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poltr1Many years ago, in my college days, I was exposed to the Usenet, a store-and-forward bulletin board system that ran on computers running Unix. Machines would call each other and transmit the day's posts. The groups were named and partitioned by subject matter. Needless to say, I spent many hours reading the Usenet news, or netnews for short. I'm quite sure my grades suffered as a result of my addiction to netnews. It wasn't fun quitting "cold turkey" after May 1988. But it was the right thing to do, and I haven't looked back.
I saved all the articles from the Star Trek and Doctor Who news groups onto a reel of magnetic tape, in groups of 50 articles. I just went to the spool directory, typed "more * > filename", and compressed the omnibus file.
Several years ago, I was able to read the tape and transfer the files to an 8mm tape cartridge, and then burn them to a CD-R.
The next step was to unbundle the articles and create an HTML index page for these articles. The best tool to do this would be a Perl script. This I've been pitting off for a while. I started writing it this afternoon, while M was playing her computer games. After dropping her off and returning home, I finished the script. I just finished running the files for net.tv.drwho. Later, I'll run it for rec.arts.drwho, net.tv.startrek, and rec.arts.startrek.
I believe many of the Usenet articles that were ever posted are available via Google Groups.
Next step: I'd like to figure out a way to create an index file that's grouped/threaded by subject name. Right now, the main index page is sorted and organized by article number, which means little in the grand scheme of things. (Article 1234 on my machine would likely have some other article number on another machine. That's how the ball bounces.)
And I have another example of my code writing to show off to prospective employers.
I saved all the articles from the Star Trek and Doctor Who news groups onto a reel of magnetic tape, in groups of 50 articles. I just went to the spool directory, typed "more * > filename", and compressed the omnibus file.
Several years ago, I was able to read the tape and transfer the files to an 8mm tape cartridge, and then burn them to a CD-R.
The next step was to unbundle the articles and create an HTML index page for these articles. The best tool to do this would be a Perl script. This I've been pitting off for a while. I started writing it this afternoon, while M was playing her computer games. After dropping her off and returning home, I finished the script. I just finished running the files for net.tv.drwho. Later, I'll run it for rec.arts.drwho, net.tv.startrek, and rec.arts.startrek.
I believe many of the Usenet articles that were ever posted are available via Google Groups.
Next step: I'd like to figure out a way to create an index file that's grouped/threaded by subject name. Right now, the main index page is sorted and organized by article number, which means little in the grand scheme of things. (Article 1234 on my machine would likely have some other article number on another machine. That's how the ball bounces.)
And I have another example of my code writing to show off to prospective employers.
