Greetings, all.

AOL, which introduced a Usenet gateway service in 1994, seems to get the
most flak for instigating the Eternal September. But at that time (and
in the previous 15 years or so) there were a lot of other commercial
online services, such as CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, The Source, and
PlayNET. Surely at least some of these must have had Usenet gateways
that predated AOL's? Was AOL really the first such service, or only the
first one that pumped enough clueless newbies into Usenet to make
existing users sit up and take notice?

Regards,
Tristan

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Tristan Miller
Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist
https://logological.org/
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On 2022-04-12, Tristan Miller <psychonaut@nothingisreal.com> wrote:
> Greetings, all.
>
> AOL, which introduced a Usenet gateway service in 1994, seems to get the
> most flak for instigating the Eternal September. But at that time (and
> in the previous 15 years or so) there were a lot of other commercial
> online services, such as CompuServe, GEnie, Delphi, The Source, and
> PlayNET. Surely at least some of these must have had Usenet gateways
> that predated AOL's? Was AOL really the first such service, or only the
> first one that pumped enough clueless newbies into Usenet to make
> existing users sit up and take notice?
>
> Regards,
> Tristan
>

You may have good results posting to alt.folklore.computers as it
seems like a lot of older technical Usenet users seem to frequent
there and have firsthand experience on how these networks evolved over
time.

> Greetings, all.

Hi Tristan

A few days ago I research an article from the early AOL era for Ronda
Hauben and I ended up reading several threads in news.admin.policy while
looking for those articles for her.

> Surely at least some of these must have had Usenet gateways
> that predated AOL's?

Yes, there was a similar, but lesser outcry about CompuServe, GEnie, and
Delphi; thoughIt seems that some Delphi users were early spammers and
that really got people angry. However the biggest influx at the time came
from AOL. Their system was easy to use and also treated Usenet as an AOL
feature, not as a thing in itself. They also provided no guidelines for
netiquette. The other services were also guilty on the netiquette front,
but their userbases were smaller and their interfaces were much harder to
use.

> Was AOL really the first such service, or only the
> first one that pumped enough clueless newbies into Usenet to make
> existing users sit up and take notice?

The influx of users was greater than any before, but from what I've read,
the "eternal-september" issue was actually fairly minor in the beginning.
One of the biggest complaints that I see over and over is how they would
often post things like "me too". Sure, this was in violation of
netiquette but it was more of an annoyance than anything. This changed
over time as more and more troll and spammers joined from all sorts of
different ISPs, but this wasn't specifically an AOL problem).

One more thing, it appears that AOL's sysadmins were active users of
groups like news.admin.policy and genuinely wanted to provide a good
service, but of course they only had so much power. (See articles from
PMDAtropos).

Archives can be found here: https://archive.org/download/usenet-news/
news.admin.policy.mbox.zip

Jason

Dear Jason,

On 13/04/2022 15.12, Jason Evans wrote:
> A few days ago I research an article from the early AOL era for Ronda
> Hauben and I ended up reading several threads in news.admin.policy while
> looking for those articles for her.
>
>> Surely at least some of these must have had Usenet gateways
>> that predated AOL's?
>
> Yes, there was a similar, but lesser outcry about CompuServe, GEnie, and
> Delphi

Ah, I suspected as much. Do we know which of these services was the
first to offer a Usenet gateway? (I suspect it was CompuServe, but
don't know for sure.)

Regards,
Tristan

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Tristan Miller
Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist
https://logological.org/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-