comp.sys.next Usenet archive

I just discovered the archive of the comp.sys.next (https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=comp.sys.next&y=0&r=0&p=1) Usenet news group at usenetarchives.com (https://usenetarchives.com/). Fascinating stuff especially from the early years of NeXT, including several discussions about (not) making the NeXTstep source code available.

And one interesting find (https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=comp.sys.next&mid=PDE3ODc5QGdhdGVjaC5lZHU%2B): NeXTstep 0.8 was able to execute a.out binaries compiled for SunOS 3 for Sun 3 machines. This makes sense, since NeXTstep was developed on 68k Sun machines initially. Of course, I had to test this.

Luckily, the NeXTstep 0.8 disk image available on winworldpc (https://winworldpc.com/download/c3b841c2-b240-533d-11c3-a4c2a90f7054) has an a.out "vi" binary in /usr/local, so I didn't have to figure out how to compile one.

You can see the /usr/include/sys/exec.h header file for the a.out format and the first bytes of the vi binary in the attached screenshot. The first two bytes 00 02 indicate it's a 68020 binary, the third and fourth byte are 01 0b = 04 13 in octal, so it's a ZMAGIC a.out file.

The Usenet post linked above indicated that the ability to execute a.out files was removed in 0.9 - all regular files in the disk image are already in Mach-O format.

I used to search through the NeXT newsgroups quite a bit twenty-odd years ago when I first got a couple of NeXT systems (mono slab and '030 NeXTComputer). People were still posting in those days so could get also answers from knowledgeable folks. Very useful indeed when AltaVista also had the full archive of all of useful groups, before Google got their hands on it and eventually completely mangled access to what is simple text data (how could they screw it up so badly?)...

Hmmmm, after (a very cursory) look at comp.sys.* in those archives - seems they have only a decent archive of the more top-level groups, so plenty of posts in comp.sys.sun and comp.sys.next but very very little in the groups below those (e.g., in comp.sys.sun.hardware or comp.sys.next.programmer).

I think we're still better off pulling the newsgroups from the archives present in the Internet Archive...

Side note: You can also find a quite good Usenet archive on the Peanuts CDs.

How do you guys read these?

Do you just use a text editor or GREP or is there a util which breaks it down to each subject? An updated archive with all the spam removed would be class  :)

I use (z)grep and (z)cat to search and read them.

Quote from: nuss on March 03, 2025, 02:20:21 PMI use (z)grep and (z)cat to search and read them.

Sometimes it is good to just browse through them all because you might find something that you weren't looking for  ??? .

Whenever I find something good in them I do try and post it back on this forum.

Somewhat tangentially, there's a site called olduse.net that is "replaying" all of the history of Usenet by analyzing the dates of old posts, adding 40 years, and retransmitting them on those dates. The leading edge of the first iteration is now in 1985. Just three years to go...