Today's pile......
Jun. 9th, 2004 01:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1......of things to go through included a 1" stack of printouts from the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.comics, from between December 1987 and January 1988.
That was my seventh and final year in college. I believe I was going part-time at that point. I didn't have enough free time to read the articles online, and didn't have ready access to a PC, so I went to the spool directory, and essentially did a "more * | lpr" to print out the articles for later reading.
Here it is, 16 years later. In retrospect, I should have saved a lot of trees -- and a lot of space -- by downloading the groups of articles to floppy disks. 3½" floppies are dirt-cheap now, but they weren't back then. And file transfer speeds were horrendously slow compared to what we have now.
I was very obsessive-compulsive about saving articles back then. I got upset when articles expired before I could get a chance to read them or print them out. I caused more than my share of grief for the system admins with my "demands". One of them once threatened to bill me for the connect time charges to the other computers (one in Rochester NY, the other in Waterloo ON) because of my voracious appetite for netnews. I'm sure my grades suffered because I was such an information junkie.
And when I graduated in '88, I ended up quitting Usenet cold turkey, since my accounts expired. I went through a withdrawal period that lasted a few weeks. Then it was over, and I haven't looked back.
I've often been tempted to return to Usenet space, but the sheer volume of information there is overwhelming. I went to Google Groups to examine some of the groups I used to read, and some I'd be interested in. There's no way I could keep up with the daily news flow now. And as Sturgeon's law dictates, 90% of it is crap. Especially in some of the non-moderated newsgroups, where they have their share of spammers.
So, looking through the articles, I marked the ones I wanted to save, and made an Excel spreadsheet with the key header information. But when I went to Google Groups to get electronic copies of the ones I wanted to keep......they weren't there. The rec.arts.comic newsgroup have since been subdivided, and there are no threads saved for the main newsgroup.
Looks like I'll have to prepare these articles for scanning, since I don't want (or need) to store them in paper form anymore. I'd love to run an optical character regognition (OCR) program on them, but previous tests of mine have shown that line-printed output doesn't OCR very well. So I'll scan them in and save the images as either TIFF files or PDF files, which take up a lot more space than the plain-text files.
As for the articles I want to save, one of them was a long post with detailed plot descriptions for Star Wars III, one that said it was fan fiction writetn by an unscrupulous dealer and therefore a fake, a few were about selling comics (which is what I may have to do soon), a few mentioned that the Bloom County books are missing some strips, and a comment on ElfQuest. And I think I noticed a few posts from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
billroper from his old ChiNet address.
That was my seventh and final year in college. I believe I was going part-time at that point. I didn't have enough free time to read the articles online, and didn't have ready access to a PC, so I went to the spool directory, and essentially did a "more * | lpr" to print out the articles for later reading.
Here it is, 16 years later. In retrospect, I should have saved a lot of trees -- and a lot of space -- by downloading the groups of articles to floppy disks. 3½" floppies are dirt-cheap now, but they weren't back then. And file transfer speeds were horrendously slow compared to what we have now.
I was very obsessive-compulsive about saving articles back then. I got upset when articles expired before I could get a chance to read them or print them out. I caused more than my share of grief for the system admins with my "demands". One of them once threatened to bill me for the connect time charges to the other computers (one in Rochester NY, the other in Waterloo ON) because of my voracious appetite for netnews. I'm sure my grades suffered because I was such an information junkie.
And when I graduated in '88, I ended up quitting Usenet cold turkey, since my accounts expired. I went through a withdrawal period that lasted a few weeks. Then it was over, and I haven't looked back.
I've often been tempted to return to Usenet space, but the sheer volume of information there is overwhelming. I went to Google Groups to examine some of the groups I used to read, and some I'd be interested in. There's no way I could keep up with the daily news flow now. And as Sturgeon's law dictates, 90% of it is crap. Especially in some of the non-moderated newsgroups, where they have their share of spammers.
So, looking through the articles, I marked the ones I wanted to save, and made an Excel spreadsheet with the key header information. But when I went to Google Groups to get electronic copies of the ones I wanted to keep......they weren't there. The rec.arts.comic newsgroup have since been subdivided, and there are no threads saved for the main newsgroup.
Looks like I'll have to prepare these articles for scanning, since I don't want (or need) to store them in paper form anymore. I'd love to run an optical character regognition (OCR) program on them, but previous tests of mine have shown that line-printed output doesn't OCR very well. So I'll scan them in and save the images as either TIFF files or PDF files, which take up a lot more space than the plain-text files.
As for the articles I want to save, one of them was a long post with detailed plot descriptions for Star Wars III, one that said it was fan fiction writetn by an unscrupulous dealer and therefore a fake, a few were about selling comics (which is what I may have to do soon), a few mentioned that the Bloom County books are missing some strips, and a comment on ElfQuest. And I think I noticed a few posts from
billroper from his old ChiNet address.
