So who is the oldest 'old hand' here then?

[Andrew Gabriel]

I can't find google groups advanced search at all anymore. Where is it?

I used to get archives of groups like comp.unix from around 1983 at work - someone would bring them in on magtapes. We didn't have the capability to generate any postings until a few years later. I think my username was sadg!geccl or sadg!gpt but I can't find anything that old. I was a relatively early demon subscriber, and I the first username I used there was [e-mail], but I can't find any of those postings now. I wasn't aware of uk.d-i-y then - don't know if it existed when I started using usenet via demon and snews.

[DJC]

d-i-y about 10 years ago, earliest usenet would be about 20 years.

[john james]

Its still there but weird to access.

You specify the group you are interested in and then there is a pulldown arrow head at the right hand end of the text box which gives you the full screen page of individual boxes one of which is the date range.

[Chris French]

In message , Lobster writes

My Hero :-)

[Lobster]

On 28 Mar 2015, [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) grunted:

Mm, I've been looking for it to. I've discovered that if you go to:

and then click the little down arrow in the white search box next to the blue 'magnifying glass' button, you get the advanced search tools appearing in a drop-down, but it's a bit weird and not very useful there AFAICS.

[Tim Lamb]

I was dragged onto usenet around 1993 when my daughters wished to post to the Eddie Izzard group.

Most of the groups I frequented are now moribund:-(

Thank heavens for some intelligent and sometimes useful discussion here.

>

[meow2222]

1200/75! luxury!

NT

[Tim Watts]

Did you say "what's this new fangled technology - bah, it will never catch on?"

You know, like half of us did with Facebook...

[Tim Watts]

And it's one of those things that has never been fixed.

OK - RSS might, if you are lucky, aggregate your feeds, but you still have to jump to the site to post.

And there does not seem to a non mobile version of Tapatalk that attempts to aggregate for mobile devices - and even them it needs the site admin to add a plugin, it is not standard.

oh - if only there was a way to have a standard authenticate protocol to read messages and post replies...

[Tim Lamb]

I am still avoiding facebook and touch screen devices.

Mail, mobile phone, messaging and newsfeeds are my only real concessions to *technology* apart from an occasional dip into the farming forums.

[Dave Liquorice]

Don't think either have mine have "discovered" usenet, it's all those 'orrible, slow, web based, eye candy, pull access(*), forums with them.

Aye, there is a good mix of views over a range of subjects and generally speaking everyone accepts those views.

(*) Usenet "just happens". All new stuff over the groups I'm in just arrives here without me doing anything but firing up my newsreader. No wandering around multiple websites and manually trogging through the indivial subject forums just in case something new has been posted.

[The Medway Handyman]

Well done that man!

[Bob Eager]

When I started, it was with terminals directly connected to the mainframe. At a third of that speed (110 baud teletype)!

[Dave Liquorice]

Aye, my first modem was 300/300 baud ie 300 signal changes per second and this predates all these modern coding techniques that squeeze umpteen bits of data onto a single signal change. At 300 bps you can just about read the text as fast as it's appearing on the screen...

[Another John]

You expect me to remember? At my age?

J.

[Tim Streater]

Anyone who's read the facebook Ts&Cs would avoid it.

[Cursitor Doom]

I can't beat that, but I am pre-Google and possibly pre-Deja News as well so I certainly pre-date uk.d-i-y and was probably one of the earliest posters to it when it did come about. I've used a succession of aliases over the years and can't even remember half of them!

[john james]

The facebook buy sell swap groups leave Craig's List and freecycle for dead.

I'd never go back from touch screen phones and tablets now.

The net leaves everything else for dead when debugging something, whether it's a hardware problem or software or even just how you get something open etc.

[meow2222]

I remember occasionally dowloading a picture on 300 baud, and it taking 10s of minutes. I quickly learned to not bother.

NT

[meow2222]

The only kit of that vintage I remember was a printer that did something like 4 cps on a 20mA loop. Memory could be in error though.

NT