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I recall a confirmation/warning message that read something like "this will post to thousands of sites... are you sure?" What was a typical such message in the days of pay-per-minute dialup access?

Whit3rd
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    The question presumes this to be an aspect of Usenet, rather than an aspect of one particular software. Usenet wasn't the source of the message, so the idea of there being a "typical" Usenet message simply does not apply. – JdeBP May 12 '20 at 07:19

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The message was

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

This message isn’t inherent to Usenet, it’s output by certain clients. It originated in rn, Larry Wall’s news reader; it can still be seen in trn’s Pnews.SH, where it is shown for posts with explicit world-wide distribution (“Distribution” set to world), or with default (also world-wide) distribution to groups in the Big 7 (comp, news, sci, rec, misc, soc, talk) or alt hierarchies (basically, any non-local, non-country-specific group which would be carried by all news hosts).

Digging through net.sources archives shows that warning messages were present very early on. Dave Taylor’s Pnews (December 1, 1982) says

This program posts news to more than just this machine.

Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this?

Larry Wall’s rn 4.1 (September 24, 1984) figures out what the distribution scope is and, for world-wide distribution, says

This program posts news to many hundreds of machines throughout the world.

Are you absolutely sure that you want to do this?

(It also features many other educational messages pointing new users to netiquette, explaining the purpose of cross-posting, limiting distribution, what subjects should contain etc.)

Version 4.3 patch 30 of rn’s Pnews.SH (September 5, 1986, published to support the new top-level groups) introduced the “thousands of machines” message:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

This type of message started a trend in newsreader programs, in university student onboarding instructions, and prompted a few humorous reactions (see this alt.culture.internet post or this rec.humor.funny port; thanks to JdeBP for pointing them out).

Stephen Kitt
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    Note that trn checked the distribution header first, and ignored the newsgroups header if there was a distribution header. – JdeBP May 12 '20 at 07:24
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    The statement was and is factually wrong though, isn't it? (The cost should be much lower, for a few hundred bytes of text. I am not sure about 1990, but in the mid-90s a news server (program) would often run on a machine which was up anyway and consume relatively few resources in terms of bandwidth and storage. I'd be curious to see statistics about that.) – Peter - Reinstate Monica May 12 '20 at 15:18
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    @Peter before UUCP I think connections were quite expensive, and even with UUCP there’s a specific cost to transfer each message. I remember a story about Bell Labs’ bandwidth bills, but I can’t find it now. Apart from that I don’t know, and yes, by the mid-90’s it would have been less of a problem (although outside the US Internet access remained expensive for a long time, even on academic networks). – Stephen Kitt May 12 '20 at 15:46
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    A cursory google search brought up https://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html which seems to indicate that by 1990 nntp had (mostly?) replaced the original uucp. Uucp was, iiuc, a dial-up point-to-point protocol and as such would have been expensive; but even then it is unclear whether we talk 1000 dollars here. After all, it's a few hundred bytes which squeeze in a few seconds of modem idle time, and back then not so many hosts. – Peter - Reinstate Monica May 12 '20 at 16:14
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    @Peter for permanently connected hosts, yes, but there was still a fair amount of dial-up activity (including feeds to FidoNet). Wikipedia mentions nearly 1000 hosts in 1984, I don’t know about 1990. So perhaps not thousands of dollars, but still a non-negligible amount. – Stephen Kitt May 12 '20 at 16:38
  • Now read https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.culture.internet/_MEKVqeDMHo/4eKbTi5vWFgJ and https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/92q4/rnwarning.html . (-: – JdeBP May 12 '20 at 17:16
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    @Peter-ReinstateMonica along with much of the email-connected commercial side of the UK, we were running dialup UUCP for email and news until around 1992-93, when we got one of the UK's earlier commercial leased line Internet connections (64 Kbit/s). Dialup was pay-per-minute. – Chris Davies May 12 '20 at 23:08
  • If you ignored the message, and did post anyway, the incident was reported. – davidbak May 12 '20 at 23:17
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    @Peter-ReinstateMonica In 1990 I worked at a college with a 56kbps Internet connection for the entire campus. We ran UUCP over the Internet, but from what I read at the time, I gathered that many sites were transferring the messages at night using 2400 baud modems and long-distance phone calls. Long distance cost around $0.25/minute. The above answer is about 2000 bytes. It might take 10 seconds to transmit it on USENET at a cost of about $0.05 per node or $50 per thousand nodes. Since 1000 nodes was passed around 1985, the cost estimate seems reasonable. – David42 May 13 '20 at 13:17
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    The second paragraph of one of the humorous extensions seems more relevant today. "Everything posted to Usenet news is archived somewhere, forever. FOREVER! Do you have any grasp of how long that is? People are going to be able to throw these words back in your face, at any time, for the rest of your life." – Carsten S May 13 '20 at 15:16
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    Don't forget to count the costs for all the people who subscribed to the newsgroups and downloaded the message. Many of them were also using dialup modems and paying for the connection time. – Barmar May 13 '20 at 16:59
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    Some major misconceptions about USENET in these comments. For one, why do people think posts were limited to 2000 bytes? A significant amount of USENET bandwidth and storage costs came from using it to distribute binary files by encoding them as text. There were even clients specifically designed to automate the entire process of splitting a large file up into separate chunks, posting it with a custom subject line that included a sequence number. Also, why do people think bandwidth and storage were cheap back in the '90s? They were not. – barbecue May 13 '20 at 21:51
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    I co-administered one of the largest USENET nodes in the upper midwest in 1990 (com50). We ran a pair of Telebit Trailblazers on a 386-based (IIRC) Unisys/Convergent Unix box. We had a couple of peer nodes which were on the NSFNET (because USENET carried some research cough). Sites which were fortunate enough to have Telebit modems got their feed from us at 9600 baud, while the rest of the folks were at 2400 baud. I'm pretty sure we used UUCP with ihave/sendme on top of that. That was an eternity ago. – CXJ May 13 '20 at 22:23
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    That warning is missing a perfect opportunity to say something like “This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilised world, and Canvey Island.” – gidds May 14 '20 at 17:28
  • But how many Joule spent and man-hours burnt? And then you get a message from Canter&Siegel about YOUR GREEN CARD. – David Tonhofer May 14 '20 at 22:29
  • We had a 2400bps modem that was just transferring Usenet 24/7 to a company next door. We didn't carry binary groups, and at one point we had to drop half of alt as well. Fortunately our email mostly went through a Telebit Trailblazer to UUNet. – Paul Tomblin Sep 25 '20 at 14:58