Remember the early days of Usenet? Using your ISP’s awful news server and crawling through mountains of alt.whatever? What a pain. Usenet has taken a new direction these days and most ISPs only offer a fraction of the newsgroups that are available and they store very little, making archives weak. Don’t even get me started on the censored newsgroups.
Anyway, if you want to return to the glory days of 1981 (!) you’ll need a decent Usenet client…
Remember the early days of Usenet? Using your ISP’s awful news server and crawling through mountains of alt.whatever? What a pain. Usenet has taken a new direction these days and most ISPs only offer a fraction of the newsgroups that are available and they store very little, making archives weak. Don’t even get me started on the censored newsgroups.
Anyway, if you want to return to the glory days of 1981 (!) you’ll need a decent Usenet client and Unison is by far the best one for Mac OS X. Unison has a superior interface and far better search functions than other clients I tested although it still bogs down when downloading millions of headers from groups like alt.binaries.multimedia.
New features in Unison 1.5 (a free upgrade) include:
Fast Article Storage Technology
Improved Download Manager
Personalities
NZB File Support
Mark Anything as Read
Rules
Favorites Drawer
Sortable images, custom headers, more!
Put simply, Usenet is the Internet’s oldest message board. Containing tens of thousands of groups catering to every imaginable topic, everybody sees what everybody else posts. The Usenet network is unique: when a user posts a message on a Usenet server, that message is transferred from news server to news server, all around the world, until every Usenet server (hopefully) contains a copy of that message.
Why should I check it out?
Originally, Usenet was the only way to group-communicate globally — Usenet archives date back to 1981 (!). Even today, Usenet is still the place for awesome global conversation — everything from good cheesecake recipes to politics to what’s the best Mac FTP client. (Which shouldn’t be much of a debate. Ahem.)
Lately, Usenet also hosts a large number of “binary groups”. These groups contain files of every type — movies, music, photos, etc. Unison will automatically piece these files together and make them easy to get!
Of course, like the Internet itself, Usenet is a vast, unmonitored wilderness — nobody can control the content posted to the servers, so caution is advised as you navigate. But, with a little curiosity and investigation, you may find Usenet to be a surprisingly rich new Internet resource — one that’s actually been there all along!
Download Unison 1.6.2 and see what you’ve been missing.
For more details on Unison check out this review on MacZealots.
