Usenet (Unix User Network) is a worldwide network of news servers that enables the exchange of news. Here you can learn some facts about Usenet history and technology. If this short introduction is not enough for you, please feel free to send us a message. Tom Truscott, together with fellow student Jim Ellis, first linked two Unix computers at the Universities of North Carolina and Duke University via a telephone connection in 1979, which is considered the birth of Usenet. Since originally only Unix computers were involved in Usenet, they made use of UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy) and continued to address the data packets by direct telephone connection.
For this purpose, the various forums are mirrored on servers all over the world, from where users can finally subscribe to them, read existing contributions and write their own articles. Thus, with Usenet, an electronic network was created for the first time, which still exists today as an independent service of the Internet and is not necessarily linked to the Internet, but can also be used offline, since the UUCP protocol also works without an Internet connection.
Usenet network and history of newsgroups
The idea of a network of several computers connected via the telephone line hit like a bomb and gradually other universities joined the new network. Gradually, more computers were integrated into the new network and thus more and more users were able to exchange personal messages and participate in public discussions in the individual forums newsgroups through the Unix protocol UUCP... Sounds almost too simple nowadays, but that's actually the most important part of Usenet history unless you really want to dive deeper into the historical-technical details about polling, Unix shell etc.
These newsgroups have been divided into eight main topics (The Big 8) for a better overview.
- Computer topics
- Science and technology
- Social topics
- General conversations
- Leisure and recreation.
- News from the Usenet
- This and that
- Humanities and cultural
Due to the constantly increasing data traffic, a central server was set up in the early Usenet history in order to be able to regulate the data flow and keep it longer.
From 1983 onwards, the central computers of Usenet were grouped together under the name Backbone, whose administrators were in contact with each other and could exert considerable influence on the thematic structure of Usenet and decide on the establishment of new newsgroups and also move and delete posts at will. In the mid-1980s, the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP) was published on Usenet, which now made it possible to exchange data via TCP/IP lines. Since any news server in the world could be reached from anywhere via the Internet, Usenet was successfully decentralized and the number of news servers continued to grow.
In the following years, the Internet continued to develop and was released by the military for private use in addition to universities. As a result, Usenet was also converted to TCP/IP, on which the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is based. The opening of Usenet at the end of the 1980s had a signal effect and, in addition to providers such as AOL, other providers also followed suit and set up their own news servers for their customers, which, however, led to an extreme increase in traffic on Usenet. A lot of traffic costs a lot of money and thus the first commercial Usenet providers appeared on the market. This thus replaced UUCP. The text-based transfer protocol NNTP transfers all messages individually and for the first time enabled computers with any operating system to participate in Usenet.
You can find more information on this website how to use usenet to download movies