Usenet Access

Check out blocknews . Not free , but IMO pretty damn cheap . Bought I think it was 10 Gb several years ago , hardly a dent - but I use it mostly as backup for e-s except for alt home repair , which will not work (for me) on e-s .

A couple of people on sci.electronics.design posted that they had a disk crash and are working on recovering. No idea on timetable.

I paid $10 a long long long time ago for access to Eternal September. I don't know if its still just $10, but its still no additional charge. AIEO is free, and is usually my backup. I don't know if there still are, but there used to be plenty of free read only servers.

I don't do the binary groups anymore, so either is fine for me these days.

I paid $10 a long long long time ago for access to Eternal September. I don't know if its still just $10, but its still no additional charge. AIEO is free, and is usually my backup. I don't know if there still are, but there used to be plenty of free read only servers.

I don't do the binary groups anymore, so either is fine for me these days.

Bob La Londe

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ES was free when I joined, and still appears to be:

jsw

It's always been free ... as long as I've been using it . e-s does do binaries , but there's a low cap on file size .

Weird. I was sure I paid for access the first time. It was a one time fee forever access. Back then it was called Motzarella. Motzarella transitioned to Eternal September in around 2009.

Weird. I was sure I paid for access the first time. It was a one time fee forever access. Back then it was called Motzarella. Motzarella transitioned to Eternal September in around 2009. Bob La Londe CNC Molds N Stuff

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OK. I joined ES in 2011, though I was on the Internet at Mitre in 91 or 92.

in 1972 I was posted as a repairman to a mountaintop relay node of an experimental Army wired + wireless military Teletype/data network. Normally it passed official business such as payrolls but during field exercises we were encouraged to chat informally with other stations to create continuous message traffic.

In the 1970s during the high solar period we were shooting skip literally around the world on AM radio (CB). One day my dad was shooting skip with a guy in New Zealand using a hand held walkie talkie (full power). His buddy inside on the base station could listen, but the beam antenna on the tower wouldn't shoot skip to talk back. My dad exchanged QSL cards with the guy by mail. That was in the days before the FCC basically abandoned CB frequencies and it turned into a garbage fest. He still has that card on the wall in his work shop.

Of course there was a guy down the way with a huge linear and tons of unclean bleed over across thousands of frequencies. Every time he keyed up that mic it made watching television impossible. Eventually he cleaned up a little, but I still got even when I got older. In the early 80s I put non resister wires on my first car (67 Cortina) and would drive by his house real slow on the way home and to work every day. One day years later he told me he could tell instantly when I started my car at home 10 lots down the street.

Street is being generous. We were the only two house on the street, and it was dirt. LOL.

My dad used to keep his beam antenna basically parallel with the freeway

2 miles away. He could talk with truckers for 16 miles in one direction to the mountains and nearly 50 in the other. The side lobes on the antenna were good enough that there was only a tiny break in conversation as a truck running past us at 70MPH move out of the big lobe into the small lobe. Most of the truckers seemed to be running power mics and small linears. Those who put an antenna up top so it was over the trailer had a great metal ground plane as well.

Me I just had a 1/4 watt two channel radio with actual crystals. If I wanted a different channel I had to change the crystals.

I didn't get on the Internet until around 93, but I was big into Rime Net and Relay Net through various dial up private boards in the 80s. I actually bought and sold some equipment through those including the first modems I used for programming alarm panels remotely. I remember trading a rifle for a Practical Peripherals 9600 with compression when I was still using the privately run bulletin boards. People would come to my place to download stuff because it was so much faster. I used to have girlfriends get absolutely furious with me because my phone was busy all night long.

In the 1970s during the high solar period we were shooting skip literally around the world on AM radio (CB). One day my dad was shooting skip with a guy in New Zealand using a hand held walkie talkie (full power). His buddy inside on the base station could listen, but the beam antenna on the tower wouldn't shoot skip to talk back. My dad exchanged QSL cards with the guy by mail. That was in the days before the FCC basically abandoned CB frequencies and it turned into a garbage fest. He still has that card on the wall in his work shop.

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I got my ham ticket only as a way to learn radio circuitry and construction when they became part of my job. I already knew the A/D and computer interfacing needed for digital radio, and was learning the math in night school.

I've sent and received a test signal through a geosynchronous Milstar satellite but that doesn't qualify for a QSL card.

In 1937 when radio traffic was lower a girl in Florida (among others) heard and wrote down shortwave transmissions that credibly came from Amelia Earhart's 50 watt radio in the mid Pacific. Other stations on islands from Hawaii to Midway could DF her approximate position but the direct path, fundamental frequency signal loss was too high to make out voice.

A storm passed through before a battleship with a search plane could arrive there from Hawaii. The pilot saw no recognizable trace of her or the Electra on the most likely island, though he did observe "signs of recent habitation".

Not in the same league, but I was installing C-Band dishes in the early days. My dad and I together at the end of the 70s and first of the 80s, and me by myself by the mid 80s. I was also at the very first ever dealer meeting for DirecTV. I also installed the very first commercial (in a bar/restaurant) implementation for DishNet. They did have residential systems in a few places, but that was the very first licensed commercial installation. They didn't even have an authorization protocol in place yet. I had to go back 20 times to say, "Yes we have excellent test signal. No its still not authorized."