"Carroll, Barry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
