Matt McIrvin on Usenet: The lost pilot episode!

[mmcirvin]

james_nicoll was just tagged with some instruction to search out the date and group of your earliest known post to Usenet. I'd thought I knew where I started posting: on sci.physics in early 1991, mostly talking about special relativity.

Literally speaking, that's true. However, I had completely forgotten that my friend and then-roommate Phil Wherry actually posted an article on my behalf to comp.sys.handhelds in March 1990. It's a complete listing, with extensive comments, of a utility for displaying tall scrolling graphs on an HP-28S calculator. I don't even remember writing it!

(I do remember the 3D graphing package for the HP-48SX that I wrote a little later, a feature that was duplicated almost precisely by standard software in later revisions of the 48.)

My 48 was stolen years ago but I still have the old 28S on which I wrote this program. Unfortunately, I don't have a source for the peculiar batteries that it takes, and it's run down.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

My first post to Usenet remains as embarrassing as ever, on so many levels.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

HAW HAW! Clueless noob in 1991! At least you weren't using AOL.

My very first post to the monastery (~1999?) was actually a reply to somone, because I had to learn how to use slrn to apply the chicken. Isn't "R" for reply how you followup to a post? Fule!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

If it makes you feel any better, my first post to a.r.k in 1992 (http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/kibology/first.html) was thuddingly unfunny, though, as I say on my Kibology page, they got worse than that.

[smashingstars.livejournal.com]

This meme has been going around for a day or so, and I feel like a complete n00b, considering most people started posting to Usenet in 1991 or earlier.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Most people who bothered responding, you mean. I'm seeing some whose first post was in the early 1980s; that's hardcore--the Internet wasn't really the Internet back then; they were probably using UUCP.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Nov 15, 1990, a horribly self-righteous screed. Oh dear, how embarrassing. Just shy of 19 years old, and really annoyingly activist-y in that way that newly out of the closet teenagers always are. I shudder to think of it.