How Old Is Rap?

From: Marek Lugowski
Date: 16 Aug 2002 03:21:04 GMT
Subject: How old is rap?  One answer here.  Why would you ever need a
faq on a newsgroup on which persons answer asked questions readily and
without a fuss.  Here goes.


The skinny:

Rap is the continuation of rec.poems.  Rec.poems, "for posting poems",
is a 1984 vintage thing, I seem to recall.

The straight dope:

In 1987 Usenet underwent The Great Reorganization: Up until then, all
the newsgroups (several hundred :)) were two-level: rec.poems,
comp.unix.  IN 1987 all groups were made into at least three-tiered
entities, to foster ontopicness, the *real* only rule of Usenet, and
the real only criterion for its viability and survival.  And so
rec.arts.* was born, and rec.arts.poems, which historically has come
to mean all things to all people, people who love to interact.

The oldest posters that I recognize who post as of Summer 2002 are
Wlodzimierz Holszytnski (wlod) and JJ Webb (for many years beau blue).
They were there when I started posting on rec.arts.poems proper when I
rejoined the academia in 1989 after working in Texas Instruments and
not having access to Usenet for a few years.  But I was posting to
Usenet since before Usenet -- exchanging traffic first at Northern
Kentucky University, then at Indiana University, then at MIT, and back
again at Indiana: all this before 1984 when Usenet started as a link
between two computers in North Carolina, Duke and NC State, I think.

Google at present does not go deeper than 1991.  Perhaps better
archives will come to light, but you should know that at the time
Usenet was considered an ephemeral medium by its participants, and
there was a lot of anxiety and apprehension and dismay when a web
site known as DejaNews started to publicly archive Usenet traffic.

This business of publicly archiving Usenet developed relatively
recently.  I say relatively, because in my frame of mind that was well
after Kim Hodges and I started A Small Garlic Press in the summer of
1995.  Clearly some archives were kept at various nodes of Usenet.

Before 1995 passed many many generations of rap wars, fun -- and poets.
:)

But the nature of Usenet being what it is, it was never a perfectly
connected medium -- often a message would not propagate, and perhaps
today's the Google Groups archive that we can browse in 2002 is not as
complete as the actual historical stream of conversations.  Or maybe
it is close, for the main 7 hierarchies, rec.* being one of them.  Who
knows what archives were kept elsewhere that have yet come to light.

My first internet account was before internet -- it was called
arpanet.  I first experienced social computing (vs. on punchcards, or
programming interactively with a line-oriented editor, which I also
did at the same time) first on KECNET, Kentucky Educational Computer
Network, a Digital TOPS-10 KL-10 timesharing mainframe computer
physically at the University of Lousiville.  It was hooked up by
leased phone lines to rooms with acoustic-coupler modems and mostly
slow paper-printing terminals and a few CRTs (screens) at Kentucky
public universities, thus making it really a networked community.
Some people could access outside this, using arpa protocols like
telnet and ftp.  Oh yes, we had friendships, online lives, dating,
feuding, working on projects together -- and sent one-line messages
that were no different than IRC one-on-one exchanges.  We lived for
it. :)


In 1982, on arrival at Indiana University graduate school, I became
marek@iuvax.arpa ..  To this day you can reach me as marek
@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu, the direct successor in network space to
that initial "true internet" global reach.  Most of us were researchers
or staff at universities and laboratories and a few companies.

In 1982 Indiana's Computer Science Department's connection to the
world (the entire university was not connected as such) ran as one
strand, acting like a dial-up, through Purdue Electrical Engineering.
A mail address was a path, and you had to know the path to reach
someone.  Giving a partial path from a known central location was the
norm.  My address then looked like this: ...!pur-ee!iuvax!marek.  This
is before the @ sign came to be.

This is known as the old-style UUCP-form address, Unix-to-Unix-Copy.

I remember vividly that fall day in 1982, when my then-advisor Douglas
Hofstadter and his friend then-doctoral student Don Byrd stood with me
in the small interior utility/file cabinet room of the departmental
offices at Lindley Hall 101, in Bloomington, Indiana.  We had a short
discussion on which manuals to pull for me from the file cabinet.
Should it be vi or emacs for text editing?  Should it be TeX or .nroff
for formatting printed text?  They both decided that I would be
happier with emacs, that it was "nicer, more intuitive".  And so I
became an Emacs person I am, albeit I do vi, too.

My signature, because for at the time I did not know what was
convention and what was your own style in these matters, is a direct
adaptation of Douglas Hofstadter's I saw: 4 tabstops hyphen hyphen
space first name.

And so it went, and so it goes.  Google is a good treasure trove, and
a faithful echo of te past, but it is not the whole thing by any means,
even as rec.arts.poems the young new newsgroup goes. :)

I ask your forgiveness for yammering at length, but I wanted you to
know a bit of what I know. :)

And here's a slightly ancient poem since Zita axed nice. :)


                yolanda on air
                -----------------------------------------------------------
                
                you've only got a quota
                of air
                i used to believe
                as a little girl
                in big spring, west texas
                
                i worried...
                
                what if i ran out...
                when will i run out...
                
                whenever someone blew up a balloon
                i'd say
                blow it here!
                blow it over here...
                'cuz i'm saving air
                
                i really worried...
                
                my father was a
                saxophone player
                
                
                       Marek Lugowski
                       16 March 1989
                       Dallas, Texas

-- 
http://users.rcn.com/marek/