THE USENET COOKBOOK

         (Recipes and food lore from the global village)



      A  collection  by the readers of USENET, from the newsgroup
      alt.gourmand.



                        Edited by Brian K. Reid
                     Palo Alto, California, U.S.A.
                ihnp4!decwrl!reid   reid@decwrl.dec.com






                        Printed 30 March 19124






              Copyright (C) 19124 USENET Community Trust

      Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material
      is granted provided that the copies are not  made  or  dis-
      tributed  for direct commercial advantage, the USENET copy-
      right notice, title, and publication date appear,  and  no-
      tice  is  given that copying is by permission of the USENET
      Community Trust.
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the im-
age of a global village.
                    —Marshall McLuhan, 1967

This is a community cookbook, from an invisible  worldwide  elec‐
tronic  community.  Like  all community cookbooks, it has the fa-
vorite recipes of the members of the community,  suitably  edited
and  organized.  The  USENET  Cookbook is a collection of the fa-
vorite recipes of USENET readers worldwide.

USENET is the network by which Unix computer users talk  to  each
other.  It  is  a  worldwide  net, made from computer-to-computer
telephone links, linking some 200,000 people at 7,000 sites in 30
countries. Besides serving an obvious  technical  and  scientific
purpose,  USENET  is  also  a medium for linking worldwide social
groups of people who share common interests.  As an experiment in
interactive electronic publication, the members of USENET decided
in 1985 to make a  cookbook  of  favorites  from  their  ‘‘global









                               -2-


village’’.  Brian Reid of DEC Western Research in Palo Alto, Cal-
ifornia,  organized  the  venture and wrote much of the requisite
software.

     The USENET Cookbook is an online database  distributed  with
the  intention  that it be published as a book.  The USENET Cook-
book is distributed with software that enables every user to make
his own customized edition of it, leaving out the recipes that he
has no interest in, and perhaps adding a few of his own  that  he
hasn’t yet submitted to the network. There will be many different
versions  and  editions  of  it, all with the same title, and all
copyrighted. Every user can choose whether to print  the  recipes
in imperial units (cups and spoons) or in metric units.

The  USENET  Cookbook  is  distributed  in  the  newsgroup  named
alt.gourmand.  It is a ‘‘moderated’’ newsgroup, which means  that
everything published in it must be approved by the moderator (ed-
itor).  Readers  submit recipes electronically by mailing them to
the editor. He edits for style, form, and content,  and  performs
conversion  to  or  from  metric units if necessary. The finished
recipes are published in weekly batches, which are sent from Palo
Alto every Thursday.

To participate, you will need to get alt.gourmand at your site. A
package of software for using it is posted from time to time into
alt.gourmand. Get that software and install it on  your  machine;
it  will enable you to save recipes easily and to print cookbooks
from them.

     To submit a recipe to the USENET Cookbook, mail its text  to
the  newsgroup  moderator, {sun,pyramid,ihnp4,ucbvax,decvax,alle-
gra}!decwrl!recipes (uucp) or recipes@decwrl.DEC.COM  (internet).
The news software at most sites will do this automatically if you
try to post to alt.gourmand.

     It’s  important  that  you  tell us where you got the recipe
from. It’s ok if you cribbed it from a book or magazine or  news-
paper,  but  if you copy the words that you found there, you have
probably violated a copyright. Copyright law is complex, and only
a lawyer can reliably advise you on whether or not you  are  vio-
lating  it,  but  in general if you rewrite a recipe, in your own
words, even if you don’t change the formula, then you are not in-
fringing the copyright by submitting that recipe to the  network.
The  copyright  is  on the words that explain the recipe, and not
the recipe itself.

The entire USENET Cookbook is copyright by the  USENET  Community
Trust,  which is a California organization formed for the purpose
of holding the copyright.  The purpose of this  copyright  is  to
prevent commercialization of the Cookbook. Read the copyright no-
tice on the title page.