uunet ends newsfeed/newsreader in US

Sat Mar 31 18:12:32 UTC 2012

USENET is definitely not dead.  I wrote a search engine and aggregator
for multipart articles posted to USENET binary groups over the course
of a year and a half at the largest providor of USENET services in the
world -- just a couple years ago.  The data rates of incoming articles
was just staggering...and growing by the day.

One of the members of my development team on the USENET binary search
engine project had been a principal at UUNET, so I do have a pretty
good idea what happened to that outfit, organisationally.  The details
are unimportant.

I do not think that the closing of a service that's undergone multiple
acquisitions by actual competitors is at all surprising.  Did the
closing of Alta Vista a couple years ago after its acquisition by
Yahoo! spell the death of internet search?  No.