History of UK DIY?

[The Medway Handyman]

As a relative newbie to this group, I was wondering, how did it all start?

Who got it off the ground in the first place?

I understand it pre dates e- groups like Yahoo?

Just interested.

[Ex-tiscali]

I'm assuming it's Usenet that you mean and not the single group uk.d-i-y. The individual groups are all part of Usenet - some general background info here

FAQ for uk.d-i-y can be found here

[John Rumm]

Don't know, but I presume it predates the "correct" mechanism for creating uk groups:

we don't have a charter.

Don't know... John S was about then, he might...

Usenet itself does - by a long margin (predates HTTP). This group looks like it was created at the end of '94 if google's archive is to be believed:

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I always assumed it was Matthew Marks.

[Roger]

The message from John Rumm contains these words:

doesn't have anything like a complete archive. IIRC the archive in those days was deja but deja went to the wall and some time later google got its hands on dejas archive but as published it is certainly not complete. Some of my early contributions are missing.

I would have posted first to rec.walking but there is nothing there from me prior to December 1996 while my first recorded post in this ng is 20 April 1996 and I don't think that was my first. My first payment to Zetnet appears to have been in March 1996.

Incidentally Ed Sirett was a very early contributor. Perhaps his memory for long past events is better than mine.

Posted in rec.walking 11/10/95

"Its taken since April to get this group up and working and it is the first group to to be created on uk.* to the new rules. Can I thank all those who took part, all those who voted, but especially Mark Alexander who organised the voting."

Which dates the 'new rules' fairly closely.

[Lobster]

Actually... 'twas I.

Must have been early-mid 90s - it predates the google archive a bit. It was certainly before the WWW and commercial internet took off, and I remember accessing it via a university mainframe.

I was spending a lot of time doing up my then home, and looking for online advice: at the time there was a reasonable amount of diy-type traffic buried amongst the rubbish in uk.misc (there were no other related newsgroups at all). I floated the idea of forming a separate diy newsgroup which curried some support, so I looked into how to do it.

I can't remember exactly the then "procedure" was back then - certainly it was pretty minimal - but I remember having to identify some official Important Bloke in the uk usenet heirachy and emailing him; consequently I think an RFD was posted somewhere to which a small handful of people responded with 'yeah good idea', and a couple of weeks later the Important Bloke set up uk.d-i-y.

ISTR back then there was only a very small handful of uk newsgroups, and certainly no heirarchical structure, which is how uk.d-i-y came to exist as a top-level group. As for the hyphenated group name which quite a lot of people have slagged off over the years; mea culpa I think - it was for no particular reason other than to delineate the letters as an abbreviation without introducing full stops.

Little did I imagine that 15 years later.... etc etc etc

David

[John Rumm]

I think when Google bought the archive from Deja they only got about six years worth. I remember many of my first usenet posts in '95 ish were not included to start with. Over the following couple of years though they sought to repopulate the archive using whatever sources they could find, including CD ROM compendia etc and much of the oldest material did reappear - but not for all groups - and certainly not for all the groups outside the traditional usenet hierarchies (comp, rec, sci etc).

[Man at B&Q]

MBQ

[Roger]

The message

from "Man at B&Q" contains these words:

Oh yes it has. Dribble (or Adam as he was then) didn't arrive on the scene until much later. 2000 at a guess but it might have been even later.

[BRG]

The start was ARPA Net (Advanced research Projects Agency Network) around

1969 that consisted of four universities that were 'linked' to form a network (University of California - Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute, University of Utah and the University of California - Los Angeles) and started the basic fledgling FORUM group.

And yes, it pre-dates Yahoo by a long way *and* several operating systems - even before Mark Andreessen's Mosaic OS (co-author) and the Netscape Navigator that AOL have finally killed off.

This little nugget was taken from a college assignment that I did during a two year full time BTEC college course that I undertook after taking early retirement around that time - ah, the memories of a lecturer informing the class that they could only use books and not the net to gather the information (b*****d it was too at the time).

BRG

[Dave]

When did Netscape navigator get killed off? I only down loaded version 9 a few months ago.

Dave

[Andy Burns]

The actual deed was done 1st march, but announced months back

Hopefully it's dead for good this time, switch to seamonkey if you want integrated web/mail/news or firefox for a separate browser with thunderbird if you want separate mail/news.

[al]

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Out of interest when did Deja sell out to Google? Thanks Al

[Clive George]

obviously imagined it being sold to IBM at some point)

cheers, clive

[Dave]

Noted, printed and stored.

Thanks

Dave

[BRG]

The owners of it, AO-Hell, killed it off last month - no further updates are being considered.

BRG

[al]

Thanks for taking time to reply. Al

[Vortex3]

Well I believe I was one of the very first posters on uk.d-i-y

The oldest post of mine I can find is inferred here:

in Jan 1996 in the name david hearn, about mice. We got cats and they (the cats) are still alive.

.....but the original post is missing from Google, curiously.

I clearly recall making a post entitled "how about this for openers" the day that uk.d-i-y appeared on demon's news server which must have been some time in 1994. I wanted to source courtrai green roof tiles.

I suspect the post still probably exists on an ancient Macintosh that is still in my loft. If and when I find it I will know.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

I clearly remember the first time I experienced "the web" which must have been in spring 1994, using the client program "MacWeb" in the back room of our old house. Amazing.

David

[geoff]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

Matthew Marks was definitely in charge when I first spammed the group

He crossed swords with some troll who threatened to cause all sorts of problems for him because he was posting from a BBC address

Following that he left because he needed more time for his DIY

[Anna Kettle]

In 1990 I was posting diy messages on uk.misc via a university mainframe. I remember being really chuffed to get a response from someone in the next door department

In 1991 I went to another job and didnt get regular internet access again until 1993/4 and discovered that uk.d-i-y had appeared in the meantime

Anna