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I want to tell a story. This is the story why I started using #Linux. And why I had no Microsoft products in my house since.
That year was 1997. Computers on the manufacturing floor at work were mostly open hardware Z80 controlled GE/Fanuc PLC's... or PC's running a several kilobyte assembly language program connected to parallel port I/O boards. And that older stuff worked like a top 24/7/365 unless the power went out or someone accidentally blasted the steam seals near the desktop computer. They were controlling large production lines long as football fields.
Then some engineer who I will never forgive decided to rewrite all the production machine systems in Visual Basic for Windows 95. Windows and other proprietary systems were crashing like crazy. Remember, this is when Windows didn't use memory page protection and was filled with kernel bugs. It was unreal. If a machine had to be restarted, the production had to be restarted and that made a lot of scrap. There were about 30 active production lines running at one time, limited to the 1.6 megawatt agreement with the utilities. If all the Windows machines crashed, it took about 80,000 pounds of raw materials to restart the production lines. Forklifts would be filling up the dumpster on the back dock.
Every night at midnight, proprietary software known as BackupExec would start at midnight. After about half an hour, the load average would increase on the Oracle database and crash it. Every production machine would routinely push the production report and would crash the entire production line if it wasn't there to sync. The whole plant would shut down shortly after midnight, every night. After a week, this got old, fast.
One night, I had a life changing event with a Windows machine. An operator called on the radio that a plastic extruder was on fire. It was a 330,000 kilowatt PVC extruder and the Microsoft Visual Basic computer was showing zero degrees on every heat zone. Obviously with the fire from the barrel heaters, it was at least several hundred degrees. A few moments later was a loud explosion and the plant floor went dark with chlorine gas. I could see light to the right of me and that's where I ran. When smoke cleared, I could see the extruder barrel had shot the thousand pound head across the plant floor like a canon. Fortunately I was only several feet away from being in front of it, so I lived. Visual Basic had an interesting feature where malfunctions like that happened a lot.
That week, a copy of Redhat Linux 4.1 arrived in the mail. I installed it on my new laptop. It was crazy fast. It did everything I wanted. I compiled the kernel. I compiled everything. It could play mp3 music. And it was reliable. It was all fun and games until some years after the IPO. Google did the same thing. I would soon learn we had a term for this. #enshitification
So this is why I love free open source software and despise walled gardens of software companies. I remember #RMS on #UseNet was a bit crazy then, but he made the #GNU software license that made this possible.
That's my Linux story. And how #Microsoft almost killed me. Other people have #Microsoft horror stories, but this one was mine.
We all know Google Search has seriously degraded, with tons of duplicate and garbage content from content farms (which Iβm sure carry lots of Google ads, so perhaps they donβt careβwe're not the customer). But also, searching for my own name (which is globally unique) no longer returns nearly as much as it used to. It used to have hundreds if not thousands of hits to various mailing lists archives, not to mention old Usenet posts, and everything I've written online since.
So for fun, I did a search and ran down the list. Basically, after about 44 results, itβs just a mix of Mastodon posts (often reshares, and not including my profile), an occasional random mailing list post, and references to my megapost on Pseudonyms from the Google+ nymwars.
But hereβs the shocker.
The Usenet results are gone.
When I set the date restrictions on my name search, I canβt find anything before 1992. Some of that is because individual articles arenβt being stored on web sites anymore, and the few mailing list archives donβt have dates that Google recognizes. And I thought maybe that was the case for Usenet as well, but nope. Itβs been removed from the internet because of some asshole apparently went after them with lawyers to get something redacted. I used to be able to search for things I wrote back in the early 80βs. But no longer.
Thatβs painful. An important part of internet history erased. (I know, people have private copies of the archive, I even know some of them, but thatβs not the same).
For what itβs worth. This is what I got from Google. And thereβs more details on the UtZoo Usenet archive at the bottom of this post. There's no blog posts of mine here because they are all offline right now, but I'll fix that soon. Those will go back to 1997.
The weighting here is very biased towards commercial walled gardens. It's clearly no longer based on references from other sites, or my Pseudonym megapost would be much higher. It's based on status of web sites, not content. It's biased *against* content.
1. LinkedIn
2. Instagram
3. Academia.edu
4. Flickr (haven't posted anything there in years)
5. YouTube (ditto)
6. www.Pinterest (*very* ditto, not sure I've ever posted anything there)
7. Quora (ditto)
8. Apollo.io (scraped from LinkedIn, well done Google)
<break for some images, all actually mine>
9. Usenix.org (paper I'm listed as a co-author on)
10. Goodreads
11. GitHub
12. Facebook
13. Foursquare (ancient)
14. W3C.org (mailing list post from 1996...the first hit that I'd consider old-style internet content)
15. Gawker (article about a blog post I made about a Sarah Lacy interview with Zuck a long time agoβI mapped twitter sentiment to the video to the interview)
16. ThreadReaderApp (some of my twitter threads)
17. Palmer House Inn (article about Sandy Neck Lighthouse that mentions me)
18. Infosec Exchange (finally, Mastodon, my most active social media)
19. opensource.apple.com (some code I wrote a very long time ago)
20. tr.pinterest (WTF google? Again?)
21. Tribute Archive (my aunt's obit)
22. PCWorld on abcnews.go.com (mention of a blog post I wrote analyzing the Google Orkut worm--remember Orkut?)
23. Portland Press Herald (my aunt's obit again, sigh)
24. blogs.gnome.org (kurt von finck's blog referencing a tiny blog post I made about being in Maine)
25. perl.apache.org (changelog for Embperl mentioning a bug I reported)
26. Stack Overflow (my home page, again, old)
27. ScienceDirect (description of a paper I wrote for INTERACT '87)
28. support.google.com (support question)
29. Ad, offering to search about info about me in Maine (presumably because that's my current location)
30. cohost.org (post, summary oddly pulls in the last sentence of my bio, which is mentions my daughter)
31. spaf.cerias.purdue.edu (Yucks Digest V2, a (true story) joke I posted to rec.humor.funny (Hi @spaf)
32. Birdeye.com, a review of their dog doors four years ago.
33. unice.fr (a copy of the emacs bindings I made for Mac text areas)
34. Forbes.com (a comment on an article about Dragon Systems, with the wrong summary)
35. IRTF Anti-spam Research Group thread (another mailing list archive)
36. UCLA (reference to the web version of Phil Agreβs Red Rock Eater Digest that I maintained through 2004)
37. A reshared mastodon post about XYZ on DTSS
38. Another mastodon reshare
39. NetBSD (same software Apple had)
40. More Mastodon (this time my pixelfed account)
41. Playstation.net (copyright for same software again; in BSD libc)
42. perl.org (a mailing list post)
43. justia.com (a patent, the rest show up eventually elsewhere, very random)
44. tronche.com (Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual for X Version 11, R6. Thanks for being in the public review)
After that, it's basically Mastodon posts and occasional mailing lists, and some references to my megapost on Pseudonyms. I used to be able to find Usenet stuff using a date limit to the 80's, but not anymore. If I date limit, I find the earliest content is 1992 (A Google Groups post, a mention in the Motif Programming Manual ("just because he's cool" π€£)), and more copies of the ICCCM manual.
Searching for my name and βusenetβ gets a usenet search engine, which does not appear to be working. http://benschmidt.org/usenet/, the reason becomes clearβ¦
Looking at archive.org/usenet, I find the quote below. As of 2020, they are offline. WTF?
> This is not a collection of the UTZOO Wiseman Usenet Archive.
>
> In 2020 after sustained legal demands requesting a set of messages within the Usenet Archive be redacted, and to avoid further costs and accusations of manipulation should those demands be met, the archive has been removed from this URL and is not currently accessible to the public.
>
> Included in this item is a file listing and the md5 sums of the removed files, for the use of others in verifying they have original materials.
No wonder it's not in search anymore. What the fuck.
If I search for "apollo!nazgul", I only find 7 results.
A decade of my life, of many people's lives, got erased from the internet.
#ComputerHistory #USENET #Search #Research