Usenet
<messaging> /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ (Or "Usenet news", from "Users'
Network") A distributed bulletin board system and the people who post and read
articles thereon. Originally implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim
Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, and supported mainly
by Unix machines, it swiftly grew to become international in scope and, before
the advent of the World-Wide Web, probably the largest decentralised information
utility in existence.
Usenet encompasses government agencies, universities, high schools, businesses
of all sizes, and home computers of all descriptions. In the beginning, not all
Usenet hosts were on the Internet. As of early 1993, it hosted over 1200
newsgroups ("groups" for short) and an average of 40 megabytes (the equivalent
of several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news, discussion,
chatter, and flamage every day. By November 1999, the number of groups had grown
to over 37,000.
To join in you originally needed a news reader program but there are now several
web gateways such as Deja. Several web browsers include news readers
and URLs beginning "news:" refer to Usenet newsgroups.
Network News Transfer Protocol is a protocol used to transfer news articles
between a news server and a news reader. The uucp protocol was sometimes used to
transfer articles between servers, though this is probably rare now that most
sites are on the Internet.
Stanford University runs a service to send news articles by electronic mail.
Send electronic mail to
<netnews@db.stanford.edu> with "help" in the message body. [Still?
URL?]
http://www.openmarket.com/info/internet-index/current-sources.html.
Notes on news by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>.
[Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>, "What is Usenet?", regular posting
to news.announce.newusers].
(1999-12-17)
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