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0 pointsstubish5y ago0 comments

That was exactly what Universities where doing here in the 90's. We didn't have physical disk space or bandwidth for a complete feed, but where able to provide all the non-binary groups in the main top levels (including alt.*).

The ISPs needed the binaries though, because that was all they were used for. People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.

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u801e5y ago

> People read the text on their Uni systems, where they got free dialup, rather than chew up their ISP connection time quotas.

At dialup speeds, the only practical binaries one could download would be images. mp3 files were practically the upper limit of file size one could download. Beyond that, articles would expire off the server before they could be downloaded.

Without broadband and better completion rates, which commercial ISPs didn't really provide (especially the latter), customers probably wouldn't really try using their usenet feed for that purpose when they had other alternatives for binaries.

I just used my ISP's usenet access for text groups until they discontinued it.

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