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September is over!
Yes, it's finally true, AOL is pulling Usenet access. Unfortunately, Usenet is pretty much a dried up corpse at the moment, so losing the AOL crowd is probably not sufficient to save it from the rampant spamming and idiocy that makes it what it is today.
I remember being particularly wedded to Usenet back in the early-mid 90's, when there were actual communities of helpful people talking about interesting topics and only moderate numbers of flame wars ensuing on the side. Pretty much every ISP had Usenet access as part of the standard package, and there were really good newsreaders around for all the platforms. Thanks to Google Groups, the content from that era isn't lost, though the interface to it sure has gotten a lot worse, especially since Google's last "upgrade". You can even track down my first Usenet post, which is kind of amusing.
As many of you know, I first got into Mac programming back in the early-mid 90's by writing JPEGView, but I also wrote another utility called uuUndo, which was a very slick uudecoder built specifically to parse multi-part newsgroup posts in random combinations and order, and extract the resulting binaries. I wrote this mainly to interface with NewsWatcher, which was an excellent Mac newsreader written by John Norstad. To test this, we would do the "All Bods" test, which was to use NewsWatcher to go to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, and then type Cmd+A (select all) and Cmd+B (extract binaries) and just watch the two programs churn through many megabytes of porn.
It was really just for testing, honest. :-)