The backbone cabal was an informal organization of large-site news server administrators of the worldwide distributed newsgroup-based discussion system Usenet. It existed from about 1983 until around 1988.
James Parry, commonly known by his nickname and username Kibo, is a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long signature, and a machine-assisted knack for "kibozing": joining any thread in which "kibo" was mentioned. His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion "Kibology", centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.
The telecommunications in Russia has undergone significant changes since the 1980s, radio was a major new technology in the 1920s, when the Communists had recently come to power. Soviet authorities realized that the "ham" operator was highly individualistic and encouraged private initiative – too much so for the totalitarian regime. Criminal penalties were imposed but the working solution was to avoid broadcasting over the air. Instead radio programs were transmitted by copper wire, using a hub and spoke system, to loudspeakers in approved listening stations, such as the "Red" corner of a factory. This resulted in thousands of companies licensed to offer communication services today. Due to the enormous size of the country Russia today, the country leads in the number of TV broadcast stations and repeaters. The foundation for liberalization of broadcasting was laid by the decree signed by the President of the USSR in 1990. Telecommunication is mainly regulated through the Federal Law "On Communications" and the Federal Law "On Mass Media"
A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers.
Mark V. Shaney is a synthetic Usenet user whose postings in the net.singles newsgroups were generated by Markov chain techniques, based on text from other postings. The username is a play on the words "Markov chain". Many readers were fooled into thinking that the quirky, sometimes uncannily topical posts were written by a real person.
Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. Until February 2024, the Groups service also provided a gateway to Usenet newsgroups, both reading and posting to them, via a shared user interface. In addition to accessing Google groups, registered users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.
Sneakernet, also called sneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network. Sneakernets enable data transfer through physical means and offer a solution in the presence of network connections that lack reliability; however, a consequence of this physical transfer is high latency. The term, a tongue-in-cheek play on net(work) as in Internet or Ethernet, refers to walking in sneakers as the transport mechanism. Alternative terms may be floppy net, train net, or pigeon net.
.su is an Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) that was designated for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on 19 September 1990. Even though the Soviet Union itself was dissolved 15 months later, the .su top-level domain remains in use to the present day. It is administered by the Russian Institute for Public Networks.
Rich Rosen is a software developer and an author on the subject of web development, who gained notoriety as an early high-volume contributor to Usenet newsgroups.
Internet in Russia, or Russian Internet, and sometimes Runet, is the part of the Internet that is related to Russia. As of 2015, Internet access in Russia is available to businesses and home users in various forms, including dial-up, cable, DSL, FTTH, mobile, wireless and satellite.
EUnet was a very loose collaboration of individual European UNIX sites in the 1980s that evolved into the fully commercial entity EUnet International Ltd in 1996. It was sold to Qwest in 1998. EUnet played a decisive role in the adoption of TCP/IP in Europe beginning in 1988.
April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is an annual custom on 1 April consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved with these pranks, which may be revealed as such the following day. The custom of setting aside a day for playing harmless pranks upon one's neighbour has been relatively common in the world historically.
Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
A prank call is a telephone call intended by the caller as a practical joke played on the person answering. It is often a type of nuisance call. It can be illegal under certain circumstances.
Piet Beertema is a Dutch Internet pioneer. On November 17, 1988, at 2:28 PM, he linked the Netherlands as one of the first two countries to NSFNET, a precursor to the Internet. Beertema was then working as an administrator at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam.
Dmitry Vladimirovich Burkov is one of the Internet industry pioneers in Russia, Chairman of the Board of the Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development, one of the originators of the Eurasia Network Operators' Group (ENOG).
DEMOS (Demos) was the first internet service provider in the USSR.
The Russian internet is a part of the Internet with its main content in Russian. According to data from August 2019 and studies conducted by W3Techs, 6.5% of the 10 million most popular Internet sites in the world use Russian. In 2013, according to these studies, the Russian language became the second most popular on the Internet after English.
