Usenet, heal thyself. Brad Templeton's fascinating history of Usenet and the early Internet shows how at every turn, the coming collapse of the Net under its own weight was averted by ingenuity and serendipity.
For a while, in the early days, a person could read all of USENET. Later, it took a determined person with a lot of free time. Not long after, it became impossible. As groups filled with more and more noise, it became harder to be a full participant. Some groups split into subtopics; some did not. At each turn, something came to solve the problem. Modems got faster and long distance got cheaper. Permanent connections got more common. The news-reading tools improved to allow you to skim and browse more easily. Inter-networking and LANS became common.
And so it never died. Each time we predicted it would die, something came to save it. It was too valuable, too important to too many people. In the end I concluded that it did die, but each time it was quickly replaced in a phoenix-like way with something bigger. The old Internet is long gone (except in those archives), but the Net still thrives today.
