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 newsreader. 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

[email protected] with "help" in the message body.

[Still? URL?]

.

Notes on news by Lars Magne

Ingebrigtsen [email protected].

[Gene Spafford [email protected], "What is Usenet?",

regular posting to news:news.announce.newusers].

(1999-12-17)