(Greg Pavlov) wrote in news:403e4119.17073830
@news.individual.de:

On 26 Feb 2004 13:19:55 GMT, Scott Seidman
wrote:


Mostly history. Usenet began in the day of text terminals, or even
teletypes! With top posting, you'd have to page through the most recent
post to see what the hell the person was referring to, and going back to
the top of the post was a PITA.


This never made sense to me, and I first read usenet
stuff on early Decwriters through 1200 baud connections.
If the new stuff was on top, you only needed to go into
the quoted stuff far enough to recall the subject and
you could bail out as soon as you did. The alternative
was to wade through *all* the quoted stuff just to get
to the new. Top-posting made a heck of a lot more sense.
For a long time I, and other people that I am aware of,
would bail out if someone top-quoted more than 20 - 30
lines' worth (later a screenful).



Usenet was not really time or cost effective on 1200 baud decwriters. Its
a much more efficient time sap now!

Scott