Anyone wanna try out Usenet on their System 7 Mac?



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Author	Anyone wanna try out Usenet on their System 7 Mac? (Read 123042 times)
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #30 on: November 08, 2023, 17:40 Amazing knowledge about Usenet / MT-Newswatcher - you're an inspiration to us here, @MTT! If I may ask another question, Knezzen and I were wondering what the .ctl groups in Usenet terms mean? They appear to exist next to the original groups?
Last Edit: November 08, 2023, 18:24 by Bolkonskij
MTT 256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer	Reply #31 on: November 09, 2023, 00:39 Well, there's something I know very little about. I don't see (what I assume to be) Control Groups, listed in the full groups list as downloaded from ES. Why you see can them is a mystery to me. AFAIK the .ctl suffix should be hidden if it's present. Just checking my full groups listing in ES, I see (only) one group with a .ctl suffix attached. alt.drugs.caffeine.ctl Perhaps reading some old *nix man pages could shed some light on it: man page for control.ctl https://sarata.com/manpages/control.ctl.5.html man page for innd > Control Messages https://sarata.com/manpages/innd.8.html eeps

cballero 1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever	Reply #32 on: November 09, 2023, 01:51 If we were the fellowship MTT, you'd be Gandalf for sure! The question is, would that make me Bilbo? Although I'd love to be Aragorn I was inspired by an MG members' desktop wallpaper gallery image posted here: (modern browser needed) https://gydu.online/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=656&fullsize=1 (user's main gallery) https://gydu.online/gallery/index.php?cat=10004
Last Edit: November 09, 2023, 02:08 by cballero
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #33 on: December 15, 2023, 17:54 Quote "Starting on February 22, 2024, you can no longer use Google Groups (at groups.google.com) to post content to Usenet groups, subscribe to Usenet groups, or view new Usenet content. You can continue to view and search for historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 on Google Groups." Just read this. Anyone of you on Usenet through Google?

68040 512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !	Reply #34 on: December 15, 2023, 19:14 I use usenet regularly and mostly lonely, too. My URL collection contains a few newsgroup servers accessible from vintage systems.

MTT 256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer	Reply #35 on: December 15, 2023, 23:46 Quote from: Bolkonskij: "Just read this. Anyone of you on Usenet through Google?" Nope. I'm still waiting for Hell to freeze over (even then, probably not). That is some announcement, and thank you for spotting it. I hope that it is true. Google Groups have been responsible for (allowing) most of the spam floods affecting Usenet over the past 20 years. Well, I for one see this as a (rare) positive move from Google. Remainder of announcement here. (HTTPS link)
Last Edit: December 15, 2023, 23:47 by MTT
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #36 on: February 23, 2024, 17:25 I realize this question is probably one I could direct @MTT directly as our Usenet / MT-Newswatcher veteran. But I think it might be interesting for others too, so I'm posting it here: I created a list of subscriptions with the newsgroups I want to follow. Everything works fine. Except one little detail. Whenever I start MT-Newswatcher, I load my subscriptions and enter the groups I'm following. It will, however, not show the posts that I have read during another session. It works like a "unread posts" function. As a result, I cannot go back to a discussion I've already read. It will filter them out. Reading every content of a newsgroup requires me to opening the full group list and manually going down the tree and opening the group. (all discussions, even read, will be displayed) I understand this is probably the idea of the subscription feature (get new discussions, read them, and move on). But is there a way to avoid the filtering of read posts and just continue using the subscriptions as mere bookmarks?
Last Edit: February 23, 2024, 17:28 by Bolkonskij
MTT 256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer	Reply #37 on: February 24, 2024, 04:36 The fine manual's Preferences Settings...[https] has lots of useful info. It is Mac OS X focused, yet most of the commands and tweaks haven't changed since the earliest classic versions. For example (adapted from the above linked guide) holding the Option key down while you open a group. A dialog appears asks you how many articles to fetch. Make up a number, say 200 (if there are less than 200 articles, it will fetch however many are actually in that group, up to the number you set). MT-NW resets the unread list for the group to the most recent number of articles you specify, fetches the authors and subjects for those articles, and opens a subject window displaying just those articles. Handy tip, but as we are System 7 focused, we can be digging up earlier info. For this you can grab a copy of the NewsWatcher Manual. Yep this is the manual for NewsWatcher, pre MT-NW, and covers every aspect of using the classic 68k/PPC version of MT-NW (or any other NW port using John Norstad's code). The PDF manual can be DL'd from this MG page. Quote from: the NewsWatcher Manual -page 22: "Reading Old Articles - Sometimes you may want to go back and reread an article which you have already read in an earlier newsreading session. There are several ways to do this. • Open the group from the full group list instead of from your user group list. The full group list always shows all of the available articles on your server, whether you have read them or not. • Use the Search command in the Special menu to search for the article. See the chapter titled Finding and Searching for details. This is particularly useful if you remember all or part of the author’s name or the article’s subject. • Select the group in your user group list window. Use the Mark Unread command in the News menu to mark the entire group unread. Open the group. • Hold down the Option key while opening a group. NewsWatcher asks you to enter the most recent number of articles to fetch. Type a number which you think is big enough. We’ll use 50 as an example (assuming the article you want is among the most recent 50 articles posted to this group). NewsWatcher resets the list of unread articles in your group to be the most recent 50 articles, then opens the group to show you just those 50 articles." etc, etc. The "Use the Mark Unread command" it mentions. - There are a few ways to do this. Simplest is to select the saved group name that you're wanting to open, and type "Command + U" then open your group. Command + U = Mark Unread Command + M = Mark Read
Last Edit: February 24, 2024, 05:41 by MTT
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #38 on: February 24, 2024, 07:16 Oh my! I did search Preferences extensively, looking for a "do not mark as read" option. Alas, there is none. For whatever reason, didn't get the idea to mark my subscriped group as unread, though in hindsight, I should have seen and tried that ... well, now CMD+U comes to the rescue. Thanks MTT!

Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #39 on: June 07, 2025, 15:58 Rephrasing the thread question: Anyone ever tried out Usenet on their System 6 Mac? I've booted my IIci to System 6 right now (I sometimes do these things) and started to wonder whether it'd be possible to access Usenet from System 6. Apparently this was done back in its heyday during the late 90's I'd assume, but how would in this day and age? Any suggestions on a client that will work?
Last Edit: June 08, 2025, 16:34 by Bolkonskij
wove 1024 MB Posts: 1363	Reply #40 on: June 07, 2025, 18:53 Oh, listening to youngsters:) I think UseNet's heyday was probably in the mid 80s. I accessed UseNet on the Mac using the Telecom module of Clarisworks and prior to that I used a terminal emulator on the Commodore. Usenet was a big draw for the early telecom services and were also accessible via Compuserve, Genie, Delphi and of course AOL Genie and Compuserve could be accessed via a custom Hypercard stack. Slogging through UseNet in HyperCard is a real adventure. So yes a Mac has always been powerful enough to access UseNet. By the mid ninety's it seemed like UseNet had moved into pirating movies and swapping porn and while I had followed a couple groups for sometime, I eventually stopped. Newsgroups seemed to migrate toward Special Interest Groups (SIGs) on the telecom services and as email picked up many of these groups moved to an eMail digest format and by the late 90s it moved toward forums on Web sites. There is a big push for an application for every task and wish more were made for older systems. But it seems to me that retro users would be better served by looking back to the 70s and 80s, where people with very very low spec gear used that gear to connect to far more powerful hardware and let the powerful machine do all the work.

MTT 256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer	Reply #41 on: June 08, 2025, 02:32 Quote from: Bolkonskij: "Anyway ever tried out Usenet on their System 6 Mac? [...] Any suggestions on a client that will work?" I would give it a try, if I could, but lacking any Mac capable of accessing networks and running SSW6 at the same time, cuts it out, for me. GUI usenet apps for the Mac didn't really come about until System 7 was a thing. The earliest that I know of and was mentioned earlier in this thread, was NetNews Reader. NetNews Reader is a HyperCard Stack based usenet news reader. It is the only dedicated newsreader I know of that will run in SSW6. I do not believe that it will be capable of accessing a modern usenet providers news feed. With needing to download a news providers list of groups, this would push HyperCard to break before the entire list could finish downloading. Let alone opening a group with a huge number of posts going back several years of retention. Screenshot #3 on the NetNews Reader page will give you the limitation cause (and that's coming from 1989). I had tried to get NetNews Reader to access the news on my 660AV Mac, running 7.1.1, it loads up in HyperCard OK, but downloading the groups list was its Achilles heel. I didn't get as far as trying to open a individual group. I never tried using the ClarisWorks communications modules like wove had But it also depends on drivers to access networks and its standard set are for dial-up only which is something I can't do in 2025. I think that John Norstad was perhaps the first Mac developer to produce a robust standalone working usenet client with his NewsWatcher 2.0, although this requires System 7.0 at the earliest. NewsWatcher 1.0 was written by Steve Falkenburg and was taken further (complete re-write) by John Norstad. I have not tried Steve Falkenburg's NewsWatcher 1.0, so cannot say if this could be run on SSW6 - But if interested in finding out; a copy of this newsreader will be located on Developer Essentials issue 6 at the MG, and it's located in this directory. Given the year 1991, it's possibly SSW6 capable. John Norstad's autobiography is a fascinating read for anyone with an interest in Mac Usenet history. [Web Archive]
Last Edit: June 08, 2025, 03:24 by MTT
snes1423 256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina	Reply #42 on: June 08, 2025, 08:55 Yes i use the garden's usenet but no one has replied to any of my posts...

MTT 256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer	Reply #43 on: June 10, 2025, 01:20 @Bolkonskij: Did you find anything usenetty working for SSW6 ? I tried running Falkenburg's NewsWatcher 1.0 in SSW 6.0.8 on Mini vMac II. And yes it appears to run fine, and seems very stable. Mini vMac of course doesn't have networking enabled so I couldn't attempt any outside connections let alone download a groups list. Clicking around some of the menus I tried "Post New Article..." and I was surprised to see this notice, which I'm sure you will recognize from later versions of MT-NewsWatcher. A similar notice has been left in there since the beginning of NewsWatcher right through to its various offspring Anyway, it seems NewsWatcher 1.0 will run in SSW6 but whether it is capable of downloading a group list from the usenets I couldn't say. As John Norstad said, the reason he decided to take on the NW1 code and produce version 2.0 was because "NewsWatcher worked just fine until one day in the spring of 1992, when it suddenly broke (it crashed on launch) because our full group list at NU grew too big, and it exceeded a limit in the program". So maybe that will be a problem for NW1 today.
Last Edit: June 10, 2025, 01:43 by MTT
Bolkonskij Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023	Reply #44 on: June 10, 2025, 07:04 MTT, thanks again for the super informative post. Good points / suggestions! I haven't gotten around to testing it last weekend though, but I will do soon and report back with my findings!

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