27 Facts About Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers.

Usenet resembles a bulletin board system in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used.

Major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider.

The first commercial spam on Usenet was from immigration attorneys Canter and Siegel advertising green card services.

Usenet was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, over a decade before the World Wide Web went online, making it one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use.

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The name "Usenet" emphasizes its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation.

Articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories known as newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects.

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.

Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available.

Format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages.

Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs, mailing lists and social media.

Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" and for exchanging them among a readership which is potentially widely distributed.

The collection of Usenet servers has thus a certain peer-to-peer character in that they share resources by exchanging them, the granularity of exchange however is on a different scale than a modern peer-to-peer system and this characteristic excludes the actual users of the system who connect to the news servers with a typical client-server application, much like an email reader.

In cases where unsuitable content has been posted, Usenet has support for automated removal of a posting from the whole network by creating a cancel message, although due to a lack of authentication and resultant abuse, this capability is frequently disabled.

Some users prefer to use the term "Usenet" to refer only to the Big Eight hierarchies; others include alt.

Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7-bit ASCII character set.

The most common method of uploading large binary posts to Usenet is to convert the files into RAR archives and create Parchive files for them.

The method requires the uploader to cede control over the distribution of the data; the files are automatically disseminated to all Usenet providers exchanging data for the news group it is posted to.

Removal of copyrighted content from the entire Usenet network is a nearly impossible task, due to the rapid propagation between servers and the retention done by each server.

Some Usenet providers do keep usage logs, but not all make this logged information casually available to outside parties such as the Recording Industry Association of America.

In 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through, which had connections to both Usenet and ARPANET.

Usenet gained 50 member sites in its first year, including Reed College, University of Oklahoma, and Bell Labs, and the number of people using the network increased dramatically; however, it was still a while longer before Usenet users could contribute to ARPANET.

The name Usenet was retained, but it was established that it only applied to news.

Early versions of Usenet used Duke's A News software, designed for one or two articles a day.

Usenet was the first Internet community and the place for many of the most important public developments in the pre-commercial Internet.

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Public archives of Usenet articles have existed since the early days of Usenet, such as the system created by Kenneth Almquist in late 1982.

Web-based archiving of Usenet posts began in 1995 at Deja News with a very large, searchable database.