"USAGE: 3,158,654,239,388 bytes web (2941.73 gigabytes), 204,150,990,984 bytes NNTP (190.13 gigabytes)
You have downloaded a total of 3131.86 gigabytes.
You've accumulated 3141.23 gigabytes (3,372,872,660,059 bytes) for downloading.
You have 9.38 gigabytes (10,067,429,687 bytes) remaining.
Your account will cycle on 2013-06-16
You have been signed-up continuously since Sat May 31 09:19:00 MST 2003 (10.03355514 years)."
After over a decade of using Easynews to get access to Usenet (probably one of the oldest Internet thingys still in use), I decided it is time to say "Farewell"
Usenet is the Internet without HTML. It predates the World Wide Web by 10 years. It started as a way to post messages among, well, if you want to know more, here is the Wikipedia page.
I do not know what I did with that 3000 gigabytes of stuff. Probably a disturbingly large part of that was pornography.
At the very least, Easynews gave me access to a pretty large library of arcane and esoteric stuff. That is the big advantage of Usenet over torrents: stuff gets posted on a server so anyone who knows how can download it quickly, wholly independent of who many people are seeding or leeching or whatever the heck torrents are about.
Their service record is impressive. There were very few technical glitches that affected me. Easynews often give out free gigabytes to customers when troubles do come up (they are very generous).
It has been a long, strange trip indeed.
