What is UseNet?
Usenet is a special part of the Internet that consists of many interrelated machines around the world. The machines that participate in this worldwide network are personal computers and bigger storage machines, called news servers. Individual users like you connect to these news servers through their PCs to access and download their content.
Usenet is a worldwide bulletin board system that can be accessed through the Internet. Usenet is part of the larger Internet community and contains more than 120,000 forums, called newsgroups, which cover every imaginable interest group. Everyone can access Usenet if they have Internet access and an account with a Usenet Service Provider like NuthinButNews.com. Usenet contains text discussions among thousands of users around the world and various binary files (such as music, videos, movies, pictures, games, software, and more). Access to Usenet’s contents (reading text and downloading binaries) does not cost anything other than your NuthinButNews monthly membership fees. For more information on the Usenet community, please visit: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/what-is/part1/.
USENET I am not the original author of this document, nor do I maintain it. You can find this posted regularly, with updates, in the newsgroup news.answers and available for anonymous FTP from rtfm.mit.edu. This document is provided here in this form for the convenience of Tezcat users, and for whoever happens to drop by and take a look. Archive-name: usenet/what-is/part1 Original-from: cChip Salzenberg Comment: edited until 5/93 by Gene Spafford Last-change: 22 Nov 1995 by Mark Moraes Changes-posted-to: news.misc,news.admin.misc,news.answers An Approximate Description Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It consists of a set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by people on computers with the appropriate software — these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide variety of networks. Some newsgroups are “moderated”; in these newsgroups,
Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980 following experiments the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public was admitted to the Internet. It was originally conceived as a “poor man’s ARPANET,” employing UUCP to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software. This system, developed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was called USENET to emphasize its creators’ hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation (Daniel et al, 1980). Today, almost all Usenet traffic is carried over the Internet. The current format and transmission of Usenet articles is very similar to that of Internet email messages. However, whereas email is usually used for one-to-one communication, Usenet is a one-to-many medium.
Usenet (short for Users Network) is an electronic bulletin board network which utilizes various public domain versions of the “netnews” software for message transmission. The software can operate over physical networks ranging from as simple as a telephone UUCP link (via modem) to networks as sophisticated as the Internet. Netnews has been optimized to transmit messages without loss and also to avoid possible mail loops and other errors which plague simple electronic mail “broadcasting.” We strongly encourage our users to adopt netnews software at their sites as soon as possible. News software also keeps messages segregated into their respective newsgroups, making it easier to follow the thread of a discussion. If you only use e-mail, messages from all of the newsgroups to which you subscribe will be sent to your one personal e-mail address and will be mixed in with each other and with your other personal messages. This is obviously a suboptimal means of organizing messages.
