Usenet Cookbook

Etheromania · 2026-06-05T13:33:17+00:00

Hello cookersSo I thought I'd remind everyone that there is/was a Usenet Cookbook. At one point it was at least 600 pages, it was professionally formatted with troff and other unix formatting tools and looked quite nice if you wanted to generate a copy.There was even a software application that had been created to help people make formatted recipes and publish them. It was quite weird.The cookbook itself is quite incredible, at the time of its' creation, talking to people casually on the other side of the world was a novelty and the opportunity to assemble obscure and authentic recipes from around the globe had probably never existed publicly up until this point.One of the net's first great works of collaboration and still one of the net's great successes to this day.I also like the idea of getting old recipes off the net, written before the web or even before the internet was on TCP/IP. These people probably never expected that there was a toddler running around who would one day cook the recipes they're posting.Link to 1987 version of the book: links: Packard even had a copy still hosted on their web server as late as 2022! artifact of a better time for the company.Just something I thought people might like.