Usenet

Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users, sometimes called Usenetters, read and post email-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is sustained among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Usenet is of significant cultural importance in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ" and "spam".

History

The first newsgroup experiments occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott.

Related Topics:
1979 - Tom Truscott - Jim Ellis - Duke University - University of North Carolina - Bourne shell - Steve Bellovin - News - Software

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UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983 the number of UUCP hosts had grown to 550, nearly doubling to 940 in the 1984.

Related Topics:
X.25 - ARPANET - 1983 - 1984

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As the mesh of UUCP hosts rapidly expanded, it became desirable to distinguish the Usenet subset from the overall network. A vote was taken at the 1982 USENIX conference to choose a new name. The name Usenet was retained, but it was established that it only applied to news.http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0111.html The name UUCPNET became the common name for the overall network.

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In addition to UUCP, early Usenet traffic was also exchanged with Fidonet and other dial-up BBS networks. The Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, was introduced in 1985 to distribute Usenet articles over TCP/IP as a more flexible alternative to informal Internet transfers of UUCP traffic. Since the Internet boom of the 1990s, almost all Usenet distribution is over NNTP, obsoleting the earlier dictum that "Usenet is not the Internet."

Related Topics:
Fidonet - BBS - Network News Transfer Protocol - TCP/IP - 1990s

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Early versions of Usenet used Duke's A News software. At Berkeley an improved version called B News was produced by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton. With a message format that offered compatibility with Internet mail and improved performance, it became the dominant server software. C News, developed at the University of Toronto, was comparable to B News in features but offered considerably faster processing. In the early 1990s, InterNetNews was developed to take advantage of the continuous message flow made possible by NNTP versus the batched store-and-forward design of UUCP. Since that time INN development has continued, and other news server software has also been developed.

Related Topics:
A News - Berkeley - B News - C News - University of Toronto - 1990s - InterNetNews - NNTP

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Usenet was the initial Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the commercial internet. It was the place where Tim Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c, Marc Andreesen announced the creation of the Mosaic browser and the introduction of the image tag http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.windows.x/msg/7fde2f6d4d5dc4e7, which revolutionized the WWW by turning it into a graphical medium. On the more nefarious side, it was also the first place to suffer from spam, with the infamous Canter & Siegel lawyers (aka the Green Card Lawyers) spamming Usenet http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.pub.coffeehouse.amethyst/msg/477832eb09859797 and drawing the ire of Internet users everywhere.

Related Topics:
WWW - Canter & Siegel

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Web-based archiving of Usenet posts began in 1995 at Deja News with a very large, searchable database. In 2001, this database was acquired by Google.

Related Topics:
Deja News - 2001 - Google

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AOL announced that it would discontinue its integrated Usenet service in early 2005, citing the growing popularity of weblogs, chat forums and on-line conferencing. The AOL community had a tremendous role in popularizing the Usenet some 11 years earlier, with all of its positive and negative aspects. This change marked the end of the legendary Eternal September.

Related Topics:
AOL - 2005 - Eternal September

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Over time, the amount of Usenet traffic has steadily increased. A small sampling of the growth follows:

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