A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s

A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s(computer-programming-forum.com)

62 points by foxh0und 7 years ago | 26 comments

guidovranken 7 years ago |

It seems like a news group dump.

Compare

http://computer-programming-forum.com/80-microsoft-visual-c-...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/%22Don$27t$20want$2...

Wayback Machine earliest snapshot is from 2012. It probably never was a proper forum.

CommieBobDole 7 years ago | |

Also the domain was registered in 2012.

Probably a newsgroup dump in support of some spam or ad fraud scheme.

https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=computer-programming-...

wild_preference 7 years ago | | |

For fun, notice the Chinese IIS 404 page.

http://computer-programming-forum.com/foo

My guess is that someone just wants this to rank in search engines to any degree and then boost some SEO juice off it.

I tried using old Usenet archives for a content site before and couldn't overcome Google's dupe penalty despite my own value-adds.

devoply 7 years ago | |

That was my guess without even looking. Forum software did not exist in the early 90s.

geoelectric 7 years ago | | |

That's not true. It was just bespoke. The first general-purpose "forum" software was mid-90s per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum but initial one-off implementations grew out of the BBS scene that goes back to the 70s and 80s. They were pretty universally crappy, and just north of "guest book" comment lists, but they did exist.

That said, enough of the early stuff in here mentions newsgroup that it was at least seeded from Usenet. By 2000, though, Usenet was essentially dead for actual communication use so I'm guessing the later stuff in here was done within a forum.

Might not have been this forum, though. It's on phpBB, which only goes back to 2000, and more tellingly, the domain was registered in 2012.

sparky_ 7 years ago |

Ahh, some thing never change [1].

1: https://i.imgur.com/Kc5xPLG.png

porphyrogene 7 years ago | |

That seems to be a commom theme. Reading this, I feel guilty for not actually understanding how to compose a regular expression. I use a generator when one is necessary.

http://computer-programming-forum.com/39-ruby/b1f5cedd082572...

kjeetgill 7 years ago | |

I was really hoping it was going to be posts saying C or Java were dead. Alas, it was regex.

cutety 7 years ago | | |

I can give you something close to that. In a thread from 1995[1] some users were skeptical and not buying the C++ hype:

> A typical programmer uses FORTRAN, COBOL, C or if they believe the hype, C++. Typical programmers don't use functional languages.

From quite a few posts I saw I gathered that a lot of people thought C++ was not going to gain any real adoption, and an OO C was stupid. Which, looking at it from today’s point of view is hilarious. Makes you wander what new thing we’ll all think is just a trend but will become ubiquitous in 20 years.

[1] http://computer-programming-forum.com/23-functional/b8bd46e4...

andrewflnr 7 years ago |

Each sub forum seems to have died suddenly at some date, different for each one. What's going on here? It's like the scene in a book where they're going through the remains of some dead civilization and saying "food still on the table, doors open... Whatever happened here, it happened suddenly."

sparky_ 7 years ago | |

The eruption of Mount Stackoverflow has perfectly preserved these poor, Perl-scripting souls.

xg15 7 years ago | |

I guess with this revealed as being fake, the solution is: each "subforum" is really the copy of a different newsgroup, and each copy was covering a different time range.

andrewflnr 7 years ago | | |

Figures. What a disappointing mystery.

loeg 7 years ago |

From the title I was guessing "Experts Exchange." Does anyone remember that?

cecilpl2 7 years ago | |

Do you remember when they changed the domain from "expertsexchange.com" to "experts-exchange.com"?

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader why. :)

u801e 7 years ago | | |

I guess the opposite is the case with "therapist.com" ;) (though both possibilities have different DNS A records).

SOLAR_FIELDS 7 years ago | |

That one has only faded into obscurity in the last 5 years or so. I remember specifically searching for programming related content on Google as late as 2012-2013 and getting Experts Exchange results. I search every single day now for programming related content though and haven't seen an Experts Exchange result in at least the last 3-4 years.

loeg 7 years ago | | |

Happily — and for all of its faults — StackOverflow has killed EE in Google results. (Launched in 2008.)

booleandilemma 7 years ago | |

Yes! I actually found some answers there back in the day.

The trick was to scroll down all the way to the bottom to see them.

pfarrell 7 years ago | |

I remember the only reason I installed the GreaseMonkey plugin on Firefox was to have a script that would scrub ExpertsExchange from Google search results. Prior to StackOverflow, it had incredible SEO for tech questions.

Opportunities seem so obvious in retrospect :)

51lver 7 years ago |

It might be more courteous to link to a mirror.

loeg 7 years ago | |

It is a mirror. Of usenet.

wild_preference 7 years ago | |

Try to register.