OT Annoying Habits (Was: when format strings attack)

[Paul Rubin]

"Carroll, Barry" <Barry.Carroll at psc.com> writes:
> When I was last a regular Usenet citizen the Internet was new, GUI
> interfaces were experimental and the World Wide Web didn't exist yet.
> Newsreader software was text-based.  Top-posting was the common
> practice, because it was the most convenient.

No.  Top posting has always been an aberrance.  It first appeared in
Usenet when Usenet (a word whose etymology comes from "Unix" and
"network") started attracting Microsoft Windows users, who were in the
habit of using Windows products that top-posted.  That happened fairly
far along in Usenet's evolution, since Usenet got started in the late
1970's when there was no such thing as Microsoft.  Usenet itself
inherited some of its conventions from Arpanet culture, which got
started in the 1960's.

> you didn't have to page through an arbitrarily large number of
> messages, most of which you'd already read umpteen times, to get to
> the new stuff you were interested in.

Proper Usenet convention has always been to trim out the previous
stuff except what you were directly replying to, and to intersperse
that stuff, like this message.  The practice of splatting in umpteen
layers of unedited past messages (whether at the top or bottom) is
another abomination popularized by those same Windows products.