[TUHS] Re: Historic "Communications Etiquette" Practices?

[Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>]

On 12/23/23, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:
>
> What this has me curious on is if in the early days of UNIX there were
> attempts at suggesting which provided communication mechanisms were
> appropriate for what.

In the early days of Unix and Usenet terminal speeds were very
slow--10 characters/second if you were on an acoustic modem dial-up
line.  Slow line speeds dictated two major communications etiquette
rules:

o Be terse and to the point.  Don't waste your readers' time by being
excessively verbal or by unnecessarily quoting previous posts in the
discussion stream.  And sending an email just to say "thank you" was
considered being rude, not courteous, because you were wasting your
correspondents' time.  Similarly avoid "me too" messages.

This caused quite the culture clash when AOL users were let loose on
Usenet.  AOL charged their customers based on their connect time, and
so they encouraged a culture of excessive (by Unix standards)
verbosity.

o Don't top-post when replying to emails.  You can't scroll down to
see the context of the reply when working on a printing terminal.

-Paul W.