Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.
Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today. Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds. Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by a commercial usenet provider, their Internet service provider, university, or employer.
Read more about Usenet: Introduction, ISPs, News Servers, and Newsfeeds, History, Usenet Traffic Changes, Archives
Other articles related to "usenet":
... Based on a true story that unfolded on Usenet bulletin boards, this new opera is a gripping portrayal of a paranoid mind that raises unsettling questions about a society under surveillance ... work is based on Mike Corley's experiences and theories, as shown in his Usenet posts and on his website ... He has a long history of posting Usenet messages detailing how MI5 has allegedly bugged his home, watched him via his television and is sending people to follow him around ...
... lawyer Helena Kobrin attempted to shut down the Usenet discussion group alt.religion.scientology by sending a control message instructing Usenet servers to delete ...
... on which a message is being canceled, allowing administrators of Usenet sites to determine via standard "aliasing" mechanisms which criteria that they will accept third ... above the cancel threshold for the group or hierarchy cyberspam!usenet "Make money fast" schemes mmfcancel!cyberspam!usenet "Spew" (large number of nonsense or repeated postings) spewcancel!cyberspam!u ...
... A spamtrap can also be a Usenet newsgroup whose sole purpose is to lure cross-posted spam ... For example, the alt.sex.cancel newsgroup charter states that any article posted there may be cancelled immediately ...
... Web-based archiving of Usenet posts began in 1995 at Deja News with a very large, searchable database ... Google Groups hosts an archive of Usenet posts dating back to May 1981 ... Google began archiving Usenet posts for itself starting in the second week of August 2000 ...