R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008

Before the Eternal September, but after the Great Renaming, I learned about the world on Usenet. A few years later, on ancient computers at unsociable hours, I met friends I still have today. We “spewed” about our teenage lives in ways that would be familiar to any MySpace blogger circa 2008, but that were radical, strange, and comforting in 1993. We made faraway friends, burned photos to CDs and mailed them to far away lands with way too many stamps. We were the first Net kids, really…