Encyclopedia:
Usenet,
Backbone cabal,
newsgroup,
Talk:Usenet,
ARMM (Usenet),
Troll (Internet),
Category:Usenet,
Internet Oracle,
Meow Wars,
Hipcrime (Usenet)
Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed
bulletin board system (BBS).
It 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 read and post
e-mail-like messages (called "articles") to a number of distributed
newsgroups, categories that resemble
bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is distributed among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Individual users download and post messages to a single server, usually operated by their
ISP or university, and the servers exchange the messages between each other.
Introduction
Usenet is one of the oldest
computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year, over a decade before the
World Wide Web was introduced and the general public got access 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).
The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called
newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance,
news:sci.math sci.math and
news:sci.physics sci.physics are within the
sci hierarchy, for
science. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the
news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read.
In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article.
The set of articles which can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a
thread.
Most modern newsreaders display the articles arranged into threads and subthreads, making it easy to follow a single discussion in a high-volume newsgroup.
When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server, however, talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and (if all goes well) eventually reaches every server in the network. The later
peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle; but for Usenet it is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Some have noted that this seems a monstrously inefficient protocol in the era of abundant high-speed network access. Usenet was designed for a time when networks were much slower, and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out.
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
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