What are those banner links for viewing Usenet posts in ASCII?

[Gale]

what's the deal with these sorts of posts that have the little banner at the top that says:

View this Usenet post in original ASCII form

just curious.

 

[chroot]

The LaTeX system here tries to automatically extract math from Usenet posts and display it graphically; it also colorizes the different levels of quotation. The "original ASCII form" is the form actually transmitted over the Usenet.

- Warren

 

[Gale]

AHA! of course... now... what is usenet then? are the people posting through that not regular members or something?

 

[chroot]

Usenet is a method of internet communication that predates the world wide web. It is a system used to transmit text information ("news") from one server to other servers; the news propagates from one server to all servers over a period of hours or days. It used to be accessed with a "newsreader," a text-based program which ran on a mainframe or other workstation. Most people access it today with much more sophisticated graphical newsreaders, or web interfaces like groups.google.com.

- Warren

 

[jma2001]

AHA! of course... now... what is usenet then? are the people posting through that not regular members or something?

Oooohhhh, a young person who has never heard of Usenet ... NOW I feel old.

 

[Hurkyl]

Don't worry -- I bet there's lots of old people who've never heard of usenet too.

 

[jma2001]

Don't worry -- I bet there's lots of old people who've never heard of usenet too.

True enough. Well, I don't blame anyone for not knowing about Usenet. Except for a few moderated newsgroups, Usenet has become a wasteland of spam, flame wars, and trolls. Web-based discussion forums like PF and Slashdot have taken its place.