On Monday 02 November 2009 10:49 pm, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > I can't say I've ever seen this, but I've only been using Usenet for > 15-odd years, so not an old-timer. Any old-timers ever seen this and > like to comment?
I don't go back to the very beginning of Usenet (I didn't have a computer when I was 9), but I started using it before there were alt.* groups. I would swear that even the rn program circa 1987 used either the "In article [email protected], nnnn wrote:" or "On XXXX, YYYY wrote:" form of attribution. But you can poke around on groups.google.com and come up with plenty of evidence. I went back and looked at a couple of my own posts from that era, and my quoting style wasn't consistent (sometimes I just indented the previous post, sometimes used greater-than symbols, sometimes had "YYYY wrote:", sometimes had nothing at all to indicate attribution) so I assume I was still doing it by hand. Maybe the asterisk thing was a FidoNet or other BBS-oriented form of attribution, but I don't remember it. I have used some tty-based chat programs (similar to IRC) that used an asterisk to indicate who was speaking, and maybe that's where the poster got confused. Rob _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
