Intro to Usenet
Usenet is a very old system, having been developed in the late 1970s. Usenet is a communications system, with users participating in groups called newsgroups. These newsgroups are so named because the system was originally devised as a way for two universities to send announcements to one another. Like the regular Internet that would follow, the Usenet system was quickly adopted by users who wanted to put it to more casual purposes and the modern Usenet was born. Today, there are approximately 100,000 newsgroups worldwide, with some estimates placing around 20,000 of them being extremely active.
Newsgroups have a lot in common with modern Internet forums where the interaction between users is concerned. Users put up a post or an article, either term is acceptable, which is added to the newsgroup. A series of interconnected news servers then replicates this article, making it available to users who subscribe through their service. This allows the post to propagate to as many users as belong to the group. The users can then reply to the post and, through the same process, users are given access to the reply to the original post. Some Usenet discussions are very long, though not all servers retain the entire conversation.
Because Usenet servers are decentralized, there is no standard policy for how long articles have to be archived. Some servers archive information almost indefinitely while others only keep posts for a few days. Each news server is free to maintain its own policy, in this regard. The original Usenet only allowed text communication. Today, text posts still dominate this forum, although it’s also become a popular way for people to share images and other files, which are referred to as binaries on the system. By and large, however, newsgroups are about conversation.
Today’s Usenet has advanced a great deal since its original incarnation. It remains very popular, though some ISPs will require that you specifically request access to news servers; this service is not always standard with Internet providers. To read the posts, you’ll need software called a newsreader that allows you to download, sort and page through the various posts. It also allows you to participate in the discussions, if you so choose. Newsgroups contain a wealth of information and are oftentimes places where people engage in very lively and detailed discussions about an enormous range of subjects including science, technology and hobbies.
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