Usenet

Much of the information contained in this section has been derived from various articles posted on Usenet and available through out Internet. See, [E3], Matrix for more complete information about Usenet.

Defining Usenet is difficult. It is almost impossible to generalize over all Usenet sites in any non-trivial way.

Usenet can be defined as the set of people who exchange articles tagged with one or more universally-recognized labels, called "newsgroups" (or "groups" for short). Usenet encompasses government agencies, large universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes, home computers of all descriptions, etc.

Gateways between mailing lists and newsgroups are very common. In this "shadowy" world of news-mail gateways, the line between Usenet and not-Usenet becomes very hard to draw. Furthermore, Usenet software and e-mail software often share many common features and can sometimes be used interchangeably.

Control through out Usenet is loose. No person or group has authority over Usenet as a whole. Every administrator controls his own site. No one has any real control over any site but his own. To help hold Usenet together, various articles are periodically posted in newsgroups in the "news" hierarchy. These articles are provided as a public service by various volunteers. Among the periodic postings are lists of active newsgroups, both "standard" (for lack of a better term) and "alternative."

Propagation of Usenet traffic is primarily through UUCP and NNTP.

In the old days, UUCP over long-distance dialup lines was the dominant means of article transmission.

In March 1986 a package was released implementing news transmission, posting, and reading using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) (as specified in RFC 977, RFC-977). This protocol allows hosts to exchange articles via TCP/IP connections rather than using the traditional uucp. It also permits users to read and post news from machines which cannot or choose not to install the USENET news software.