usenet still out there?

Article: 7554 of alt.hackers
From: chess@watson.ibm.com
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: usenet still out there?
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 95 14:24:25 est
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Lines: 41
Approved: username@host.subdomain.domain
Message-ID: 2f7710e9.f4.chess@watson.ibm.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: bedivere.watson.ibm.com
Status: RO

A question that will no doubt show how clueless and
Out of Touch I am:

  Does Usenet, in the sense of a bunch of folks with Unix(tm)y
  systems that phone each other up periodically and exchange
  files via the uucp program, still exist?

Any and all flames, answers, folklore, etc, welcome.

ObHack: After a long and blessed period of not having to, I
had to make some foils (viewgraphs, transparencies, whatever)
the other day, for to give a Pitch with.  I've changed both
worktstations and operating systems a couple of times since
the last time I had to do that, so I had no foilmaking programs
lying about.  Also, the standards for an acceptable foil have
risen considerably since last time I made any, and you now
have to have at least a few fonts, a company logo, and
preferably color, in order to avoid being perceived
instantly as Clueless, and everyone goes back to playing
Galactic Empires on their ThinkPads.  So what to do?  I
had, of course, about three hours to do whatever it was.

No problem!  I recently learned HTML, of course, for hacking
up a homepage.  And Mosaic has a "Save as...  PostScript"
button.  So I made up the foils in HTML, brought up Mosaic,
saved them as PostScript, printed them off on the color
printer (having snarfed a logo and a couple of decorative
color GIFs from my web pages), and voila!  Not actually
that simple, of course; I learned that the PS files that
Mosaic saves are for an infinite pagelength, and the sizes
of the pages it produuced needed tweaking, and some of the
colors were off.  But a little PS-hacking fixed all that
(dontcha love RPN languages?), and I was ready with plenty
of seconds to spare...

- -- -
David M. Chess                    /   ROT13 is my radio station!   /
High Integrity Computing Lab
IBM Watson Research

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