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         /" "|" |_|     /\  |\ | |\ | "|" \ / [" |") ("  /\  |") \ /
         _)  |  | |    /""\ | \| | \| _|_  V  |_ |"\ _) /""\ |"\  |


         /"\ ["     /\  |  "|"    /\  (" /' "|" "|" _  /\  |") "|"
         \_/ |     /""\ |_  |  o /""\ _) \. _|_ _|_   /""\ |"\  |



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From: bumgarls@falcon.jmu.edu (Lee S. Bumgarner)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Back in the day...a return to the Great Renaming FAQ
Date: 8 Apr 1996 03:17:51 GMT
Message-ID: <4ka0gv$6t0@doc.jmu.edu>


Let me start out by explaining what I'm doing: 

This is the latest revision to the Great Renaming FAQ. It's not done 
(not spell check yet,even) and that's where I need your help. 
Besides any spelling mistakes that might befound, give me your 
advice on how to make this better.  If you've read the old Great 
Renaming FAQ, you can pretty much skip down to near the end where 
I've added some new stuff. I need some clearification about what 
*exactly* the rules are about voting.  

thanks.


The Early Years

The first time anything like Usenet was ever used was during the 
price and wage controls of the early 70's. It was a way for the 
government to make sure all the controls were uniform. However, it 
would not be until the late 70's that Usenet was actually born. 
Usenet was created in late 1979as the Unix User Network when Duke 
University graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, decided to 
connect computers together in order for the Unix community to 
communicate. The first two sites were "unc" and "duke," commputers 
another graduate student Steve Bollovin had installed his news 
software on. From this point word spread and Usenet began to grow 
quickly.  

Usenet in the early 80's was an obscure computer network made up of 
academics and Unix users. At least one AT&T employee seems to have 
though it was owned by them, because one source reported a post 
saying something about a light in the AT&T parking lot.  According 
to Tom Geller in the Net Magazine, the first three newsgroups were 
net.general, net.v7bugs and net.test. The old system could be the 
possible origin of Usenet's other name, "netnews." Yet as with any 
communications device, once it began to grow in popularity, 
newsgroups without any technical meaning began to show up, and 
eventually caused problems.  

The mythological "Usenet Cabal," often referred to jokingly during 
debates over new newsgroups actually existed in the form of the 
"Backbone Cabal." Orginially organized by "father of the Backbone" 
Gene Spafford in 1983 and formalized by him after the Great 
Renaming, the Cabal was a group of site admins and their close 
friends who participated in a mailing list created to encourage 
stable news and mail software.  The Cabal's power came from the 
technology Usenet was using at the time. During these early years of 
Usenet, UUCP, a point-to-point connection protocol was Usenet's only 
communication method. NNTP, which would allow news traffic over 
ARPAnet, (Internet's foremother) had yet to become widely used. The 
two systems were connected, but not as interdependent as Internet 
and Usenet are today.  

Usenet had the form  of a graph (in the graph-theory sense).  
"Network maps" were produced  from time to time. ( See Appendix )
Eventually huge Postscript files were made showing how big Usenet 
had gotten. On such a diagram you can choose to emphasize a set of 
lines forming a path through the hosts.  Usenet's "backbone" was 
simply a group of hosts whose admins agreed to form such a connected 
set. They further agreed to to devote whatever resources were 
necessary to carry all the Usenet traffic and to pass it on 
promptly. Other, non-backbone sites might wait until night, when 
their machines were less busy, to pass news along. During these 
early years, a news feed depended greatly on who you knew. A lot of 
people got feed because of the generosity of Bill Shannon and 
Armando Stenttner who ran "decvax" at Digital (DEC). During its 
hayday, the average post arriving on any given machine would likely 
have been sent through a Backbone computer, because the backbone 
enabled it to arrive quicker than any other link. Without the 
Backbone,  Usenet propagation would be incredibly delayed or just 
expire before it could be transmitted. This actually happened when a 
key site like the AT&T machine in Naperville, IL, known as "ihnp4", 
through which almost 100% of news flowed from the West Coast.  

By 1986, Usenet was experincing some growing pains. The original 
scheme of just three worldwide hierarchies - net.* for unmoderated 
groups, mod.* for moderated groups and fa.* for from ARPAnet was 
becoming difficult to  administer. The fairly haphazard way in which 
new names were developed, at one point one could create a group 
simply by posting to it, (several were created due to typos) only 
made things worse. (This haphazard scheme still exists for local 
newsgroups.) 

Things came to a head when one particular net.god, future UUnet 
founder and Bill Gates' pal Rick Adams, decided something must be 
done. Adams, site admin for"seismo," at the Center for Seismic 
Studies in northern Virginia, was powerful for a number of reasons. 
Among them was seismo's status as the only link to Europe from the 
US.  

The Great Renaming discussion began in part because transmitting 
news was quite expensive in those days and the Europeans refused to 
pay for the fluff groups like net.religion and net.flame. According 
to a post by Joe Buck, Adams proposed a "talk" hierarchy for the 
high flame groups. As the Great Renaming discussion progressed, it 
was generally understood that if a group was put in talk.* instead 
of  soc.* it would not be as widely propagated. According to Buck, 
"The idea was that he could simply put '!talk' in the configuration 
file for each connected site that didn't want these groups," 

According to the soc.culture.jewish FAQ, the group's name is an 
example of this. Orginally "net.religion.jewish," it was generally 
believed during the GreatRenaming discussion that renaming it 
"talk.religion.jewish" would be detrimental to the group's success. 
This problem was solved by proposing the group be placed in the 
soc.culture.* hierarchy.  

Due to Usenet's structural conservatism, Adams had to threaten to 
pull out ofUsenet altogether before people took notice. Thus, 
through default, the task of the Great Renaming was given to the 
Backbone Cabal. The Great Renaming started July 1986 and ended in 
March 1987, according to Henry Edward Hardy's history. Among the 
people involved with the initial discussion on the mailing list were 
Chuq von Rospach and Spaf. There was some concern that the Backbone 
Cabal, which was made up of a small group male computer experts in 
their 20's and30's, would be deciding the newsgroups for the entire, 
diverse Usenet community. The Cabal and their cronies often 
reiterated a magic phrase: "Usenet works by the golden rule: whoever 
has the gold, makes the rules." This was their way of saying they 
weren't going to pay the long-distance transmission charges for 
groups they didn't like.  

Much of the debate centered on ways in which the wider Usenet 
community could somewhat support the backbone financially, so 
everyone could keep getting the  groups they wanted. In the end, no 
one thought anything like that would work. Various people also 
proposed schemes for cutting down volume. As the Great Renaming 
discussion progressed, a current list of proposed new newsgroups was  
posted to net.news several times along the way. However, protests by 
a few vocal people forced changes (This is Usenet after all). So 
under the direction of the Cabal the Great Renaming happen. One of 
the big debates of the Great Renaming had been whether there should 
be a "drugs" newsgroup *anywhere,* This putative newsgroups was the 
example people used of a group that sysadmins would never be able to 
convince their bosses to support. Usenet at the time was a  very low 
key affair and Sysadmins feared drawing any undue attention to 
Usenet ingeneral. They feared if their bosses became aware of a drug 
newsgroup they would pull the plug on their Usenet feed altogether. 
In any event, under the direction of the direction of the Cabal, the 
Great Renaming happened and the current comp,misc,news,rec,sci, 
soc,talk, was created.  

Yet ironically, nothing really changed for a significant portion of 
sites, and almostall the sites except company ones still got a full 
feed.  As has been so often the case in Usenet history, its 
"imminent death" was postponed by advances intechonology. The 
connectivity, modem baud rates, storage capacity, etc improved   so 
dramatically that very few university and public-access sties 
dropped the soc.*  talk.* and later alt.* groups.  

For a few years after the Great Renaming, however, these groups were 
not transmitted to Europe, although that changed after NNTP. So the 
major effect of the Great Renaming was just to organize the groups 
better.  Since the community in question was Usenet, there was bound 
to be some disagreement over the proposed general renaming of 
groups.  

After the 1986 Usenix conference, Spaf formalized the Backbone 
Cabal. He began to regulerly post a PostScript map and a description 
of what was a Backbone site. Spaf, quoted by Hardy, said a being a 
Backbone site ment "good connectivity, carrying the mainstream 
groups, and a commitment to stable news and mail software." 


At some point, Net.Legend Brian Reid, a member of the Cabal, decided 
he didn't like how things were going. So he, John Gilmore and Gordon 
Moffett discussed the creation of an "Alternet" over dinner on May 
7, 1987 at G.T's Sunset BBQ in Mount View California. An 
"alternative" distribution system was organized by this group that 
didn't use the "backbone" links. A new top-level hierarchy name 
"alt.*" was created for this distribution. In Henry Edward Hardy's 
history, Reid is quoted as saying: 

 " John's home computer was "hoptoad"; my home computer was
  "mejac". We set up a link between us, and each of us set up a
  link to amdahl, and we vowed to pass all alt traffic to each
  other and to nurse the net along. In those days one sent out
  numerous newgroup messages in the hopes that one would "take";
  by the end of May the groups alt.test, alt.config, alt.drugs,
  and alt.gourmand were active. At the time I also managed
  "decwrl", so I quietly added "alt" to the list of groups that
  it carried. "

Reid created the first alt.* group, alt.gourmand , because the Cabal 
wanted to put  his recipe group under rec.food.* Reid, who was 
moderating mod.recipies, objected to the name rec.food.recipes 
because there were non-food recipes.Gilmore objected the Cabal's 
dropping of net.flame and the refusal to create rec.drugs. (Moffett 
just wanted to help.) Alt.drugs was also created around this time.  

Yet it was not until the rec/soc.sex debate nearly a year later that 
alt.* really began to take off. It all started because Richard 
Sexton is a bad speller. Sexton wanted to show his friend Ralph 
Freidenberg how to post to Usenet, so as a joke he posted the 
message "I propose the newsfroup rec.fucking." to talk.bizarre. At 
the time, he thought he had set the distribution to "local" thus 
keeping it on the gryphon.com machine. Yet because of a spelling 
error in the "Distribution:" line the post went out into the greater 
Usenet. There was a lot of sex-related traffic being carried in 
soc.singles at the time, and the talk.bizarre readers of the time 
would not let an idea like that go, so the idea took on a life of 
its own.  

According to Peter daSilva, this was all happening during a time 
when the Backbone Cabal was beginning to experiment with interest 
polls.  "Rec.fucking was one of a series of proposals created to 
attack the Cabal (along with comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac and 
sci.aquaria, somewhat later)...." da Silva stated in a post.  

(As a side note, c.p.tcp-ip.eniac is essentially a joke group. The 
eniac was one of the first computers ever created and thus could not 
support TCP/IP.) 

After the groups name went from rec.sex to soc.sex in a futile attempt to
pass it, Reid proceeded to create alt.sex and alt.rock-n-roll the 
afternoon of April 3, 1988. Reid sent the following to the Backbone 
Cabal when he did it: 

That meant that the alt network now carried alt.sex and alt.drugs.  
It was therefore artistically necessary to create alt.rock-n-
roll,which I have also done. I have no idea what sort of traffic it 
will carry. If the bizzarroids take it over I will rmgroup it or 
moderate it;otherwise I will let it be.  
                    -taken from Henry Edward Hardy's Internet History.


Breaking of the Backbone Cabal

A number of simultaneous events rendered the Backbone Cabal 
irrelevant. The most important was the increase use of NNTP around 
this same time. Usenet's use of Internet made it easer to ignore 
what the Backbone news admins thought. Acording to Reid, the 
Backbone started to decline when he and Richard Sexton snuck the 
site "gryphon" into the Backbone news admins thought. Acording to 
Reid, the Backbone started to decline when he and Richard Sexton 
snuck the site "gryphon" into the backbone. It was arranged to get 
"gryphon," a 386 PC in Greg Laskin's living room in Los Angeles, to 
get news feed from "famous and important" backbone sites and thus 
put into the official backbone map.  

 Also, the new procedures set up after the Great Renaming led to a 
challenge by "readers" against the "privileged" positions of the 
admins.  Early in Usenet's life, one could create a group simply by 
posting to it, and a number of groups were created because of typos. 
Later a new group would be created after a subject had sufficient 
traffic on an existing group. Then the Cabal would figure out the 
name and create it.  The Cabal was strongest right before the Great 
Renaming:  backbone sites refused to carry groups they considered 
stupid.  

  The new procedure went something like this, according to Greg 
Woodbury.  Someone proposed a newsgroup and then the Cabal talked 
about the potentials of/for the new group. The Cabal defined a name 
for the group, and asked for theviews of other admins a bout the 
group and then finally if the group name was  good enough they would 
create the group. The original system eventually became the proposal 
and "vote" scheme of the Big *. Holding votes was a way to make 
people shut up if a group was unpopular. Even though there is no one 
"in control"of Usenet, the voting system is the colsest thing to a 
government it has. The current voted format was laid down around 
right before the Great Renaming, but not used until 1987. Once the 
voting mechanism was in place, the individual opinions of the 
backbone-site admins no longer mattered much..  

Lastly, Usenet's changing make up was involved. Adams was given a 
loan by USENIX to set up a non-profit Usenet site. Eventually this 
became UUnet and thus as a commercial entity existing to distribute 
news, had every reason _to_ carry all of alt.* .  

During the Cabal's last days, its death was quicken by "comp.women" 
debacle, as it was later known. In summer, 1988, a newsgroup for 
woman was proposed. Its creation became the subject of a massive 
flame war because its supporters wantedto put it in the comp.* 
groups for better propagation. Opponents noted this hierarchy was 
devoted to far more technical things. After *much* discussion 
someone created a " comp.society.women" out of exasperation. This 
person got a great deal of flamage for doing so, but the group came 
to life after it was created.  

About a month or so after the comp.society.women debate, the 
backbone mailinglist having gone almost entirely silent, Spaf 
announced he was going to shut it down. It had become silent because 
very few people were using dialup UUCPnet links anymore. A few 
months after _that_, it was observed that the list had become 
/dev/null. According to Jim Jewett, the Cabal's "last act was to 
sanction Ed Vielmetti's rush creation of comp.sys.next." Regardless, 
the Backbone Cabal was dead, and the "Usenet Cabal" myth was born.  

Richard Sexton and Usenet consitutional crisis.

Yet in a way things did not change all that much. After the death of 
the Backbone Cabal, Spaf was installed as the new group creation 
"Tsar." Spaf's place in Usenet culture can not be over stressed, 
even though his famus "Burn out letter." was posted in the early 
90's.  

One of the biggest events during Spaf's post-Backbone Cabal days was 
the 1989 aquarium reorganization controvery, which is the closest to 
a constiutional crisis Usenet will ever get. Richard Sexton noticed 
at some point that there was no newsgroup for tropical fish 
officanos. He posted to rec.pets, but only got 2 responses in 6 
months. He thus proposed a group for aquaria. When the vote failed 
by a 10% margin, Bob Webber created alt.aquaria. Soon, the group was 
getting about 40 posts a day but because it was in alt.* it did not 
have great distibution and was not read in Europe. Readers of the 
group generally believed that it should subject sould be mainstreemed 
via a rec.group.  

Yet Sexton decided disagreed. A vote for sci.military had recently 
been succesful and Sexton reasoned "if killing people was a science 
then so was keeping tropical fish; besides, sci.aquaria would make 
it to Europe," Sexton says in the Net.Legends FAQ.  

Following the newsgroup creation guidelines of the time, a 
discussion was held for two weeks on the group, and popular opinion 
was very much against it. Yet the discussion phase was non-binding 
so Sexton went ahead and called the vote anyway. At this point, the 
Backbone Cabal came back for one last fight. Sexton got a lot of his 
ex-Cabal friends to skillfully forge yes votes and the group passed 
938 to 727. The forgeries went undetected and Spaf created the 
group, although many sites did either refused to honor the newsgroup 
or forwarded its traffic into one of the other *.aquaria groups. It 
was a this point that newsgroup creation rules were changed and 
among the changes was the additon of 2/3's majority rule for a 
successful vote.  

Thanks

   Many thanks to the following, for without them this thing would not
   exist:

   James "Kibo" Parry , kibo@world.std.com, David
   Lawrence(tale@uunet.uu.net), ebrandt@cs.hmc.edu
   bet@std.sbi.com,jgd@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (John G
   Dobnick),bengtl@maths.lth.se "Bengt Larsson, jpc@hammer.msfc.nasa.gov
   (J. Porter Clark),Gregory G. "Wolfe" Woodbury, (ggw@cds.duke.edu),
   msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) Ed.Falk@Eng.Sun.COM (Ed Falk),jgd@alpha1.
   csd.uwm.edu (John G Dobnick), tgl@netcom.com (Tom Lane),
   Karl_Kleinpaste@cs.cmu.edu shore@dinah.tc.cornell.edu (Melinda
   Shore),glenn@access.digex.net (D. Glenn Arthur Jr.),
   atkinson@sundance.itd.nrl.navy.mil (Ran Atkinson), twilson@netcom.com
   (Tom Wilson), jmaynard@admin5.hsc. uth.tmc.edu (Jay
   Maynard), jamie@cs.sfu.ca (jamie andrews), Henry Edward Hardy
   seraphim@umcc.umich

--------------------------------------------------------------------
                               Appendix:
--------------------------------------------------------------------

UUCP/USENET Logical Map  -   June 1, 1981 / mods by S. McGeady 11/19/81

            (ucbvax)
+=+================================+==+
| |                                |  |
| |             wivax              |  |
| |               |                |  |
| |      microsoft| uiucdcs        |  |
| | genradbo    | | |  |           |  |           (Tektronix)
| |    |        | | |  | purdue    |  |
|decvax+=+=+====+=+=+  | |         |  |
|      | | |      |    | | pur-phy |  |                        tekmdp
|      | | |      |    | |     |   |  |                           |
+@@@@@cca| |      |    | |     |   |  |                           |
|      | | |  +=pur-ee=+=+=====+===+  |                           |
|   csin | |  |   |                   |                           |
|        | +==o===+===================+==+========+=======+====teklabs=+
|        |    |                                                        |
|        |    |                    pdp phs   grumpy  wolfvax           |
|        |    |                     |   |      |        |              |
|        | cincy                unc=+===+======+========+              |
|        |   |        bio       |                                      |
|        |   |  (Misc) |        |            (Misc)                    |
|        |   | sii  reed        |    dukgeri duke34  utzoo             |
|        |   |  |    |          |         |   |       |                |
|   +====+=+=+==+====++======+==++===duke=+===+=======+==+=========+   |
|   |      |    |     |      |   |                       |         |   | u11
0
| bmd70  ucf-cs ucf   | andiron  |                       |         |   |   |
|                     |          |                       |         |   |   |
|               red   |          |                       |         |   | pyu
x
|                |    |          |     zeppo             |         |   |   |
|    psupdp---psuvax  |          |       |               |         |   |   |
|                |    |          | alice |   whuxlb      | utah-cs |   | hou
x
|             allegra |          | |     |     |         |   |     |   |   |
|                  |  |          | |     |     |         |   |  +--chico---+
|              +===+=mhtsa====research   |   /=+=======harpo=+==+     |    |
|              |   |  |  |               |  /            |            |    |
|            hocsr |  |  +=+=============+=/           cbosg---+      |    |
| ucbopt           |  |    |                             |     |   esquire |
|    :             |  |    |                           cbosgd  |           |
|    :             |  |    |                                   |           |
| ucbcory          |  | eagle==+=====+=====+======+=====+      |           |
|    :             |  |  |     |     |     |      |     |      |  +-uwvax--+
|    :             |  |  |   mhuxa mhuxh mhuxj mhuxm mhuxv     |  |
|    :             |  |  |                                     |  |
|    :             |  |  |        +----------------------------o--+
|    :             |  |  |        |                            |
| ucbcad           |  |  |      ihpss    mh135a                |
|    :             |  |  |        |         |                  |
|    :             \--o--o------ihnss----vax135----cornell     |
|    :                |  |        |         |                  |
+=+==ucbvax=======+===+==+=+======+=======+=+========+=========+
  (UCB) :         |        |              |          | (Silicon valley)
     ucbarpa   cmevax      |              |        menlo70--hao
        :                  |              |        |    |
     ucbonyx               |              |        |   sri-unix
                           |           ucsfcg1     |
                           |              |        |
Legend:                    |              |      sytek====+========+
-------                    |              |               |        |
- | / \ + + Uucp        sdcsvax=+=======+=+======+     intelga   zehntel
=           "Bus"               |       |        |
o           jumps               sdcarl  phonlab  sdcattb
:           Berknet
@           Arpanet


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