I'm really enjoying browsing the "Usenet Oldnews Archive Newsgroups List" on gopher. It's an archive of Usenet posts from May of 1981 until somewhere in mid-March of 1982.
An example of an entertaining post from the FA.apollo group:
"Are Windows Necessary?
It appears to me that one area of vastly greater functionality
that should arrive with personal workstations is the capability to view more than one item at a time, e.g., "window"
...
Can any of you who now have this capability comment on whether (and by how much) you find that it saves time or increases the quality of your efforts?"
Golden.
2025-11-10 · 6 months ago · 👍 norayr, loopdreams, baran · 🔥 1
3 Comments ↓
👻 darkghost · Nov 10 at 19:48:
If only I could reach back through time and scream "its a trap! run!"
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · Nov 15 at 01:57:
I agree with the sentiment behind that. Our psyches have become so fractured and distracted. I will say that multiple windows (or monitors, or even workspaces) is useful when doing word processing, or layout/design. It has saved me time to be able to drag/drop text blocks from one place to another, or see the output of code in window Y while you're writing it in window X. That said, in the balance of time wasted to distraction vs. time saved by those tools, I'm still not sure. Nor do I know how to evaluate the question quantitatively.
🐙 norayr [mod] · Apr 21 at 20:14:
can i find usenet archives like these for that main known usenet without having to sign up to some nntp service?