Better late than never

AOL has decided to discontinue Usenet access for its users, probably as a public service to the rest of us. I'd say this comes eleven years too late, but better late than never.

Oh, sweet memories of AOL... Way back when, sometime in 1995 or thereabout, there was a small bunch of Finns and a lot of AOLers on finet.sex. All the AOLers were posting that they are over 21 and they want the video, although it must have been months since anyone mentioned what video they were talking about, and all the Finns were making fun of AOLers in Finnish. After rot13 failed to convert Finnish into English the AOLers started wondering what is this strange encryption system all about, and Finns explained to them that they are on a Finnish newsgroup.

AOLers then asked Finns to stop speaking Finnish on finet.sex, and explained to them that it was not a Finnish newsgroup, but a newsgroup about sex that got accidentally put into a Finnish newsgroup hierarchy. This statement caused much amusement. In the end some particularly bright AOLer figured that this was indeed a Finnish newsgroup, and told us that he adores Finnish women, especially the lovely Pekka Mäkinen. He even wrote some poem for Pekka.

Those were the days...