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Usenet: Articles
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Usenet is Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), with articles sent from one news server to another like email,. Each article is first stored on that server's hard drive, then forwarded to the server's "mailing list" of other news servers. Each of them in turn stores it on their hard drive, and sends the articles to their list of servers, and so on. Usenet article "packets" ripple out from the originating site, taking varying amounts of time and various routes to travel to you. Usenet was never meant to handle binary material; just ASCII text. To work around this block, methods were devised to convert (encode) binaries into text for posting, and then back to their original binary form (decode) after downloading. Many encoding schemes are available, but UUencode/UUdecode are the most accepted Usenet standards. yEnc is the current "Hot" trend in encoding binaries due to it's reduced transmitted file size.
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Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributedInternetdiscussion system that evolved from a general purposeUUCParchitecture of the same name. It was conceived byDuke Universitygraduate studentsTom TruscottandJim Ellisin 1979. Users read and poste-mail-like messages (called "articles" or "posts") to one or more of a number of categories, callednewsgroups. Usenet resemblesbulletin board systems(BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the variousInternet forumswhich are widely used today.
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The transmission of a Usenet article is centered around the unique Message-ID: header. When an NNTP site offers an article to a neighbor, it says it has that specific Message ID. If the neighbor finds it hasn't received the article yet, it tells the feed to send it through; this is repeated for each and every article that's waiting for the eighbor. Using unique IDs helps prevent a system from receiving five copies of an article from each of its five news neighbors, for example.
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In addition to UUCP, early Usenet traffic was ... exchanged with Fidonet and other dial-up BBS networks. Widespread use of Usenet by the BBS community was facilitated by the introduction of UUCP feeds made possible by MS-DOS implementations of UUCP such as UFGATE (UUCP to FidoNet Gateway), FSUUCP and UUPC. The Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, was introduced in 1985 to distribute Usenet articles over TCP/IP as a more flexible alternative to informal Internet transfers of UUCP traffic. Since the Internet boom of the 1990s, almost all Usenet distribution is over NNTP, rendering obsolete the earlier dictum that "Usenet is not the Internet."
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The basic unit of Usenet news is the article. This is a message a user writes and ``posts'' to the net. In order to enable news systems to deal with it, it is prepended with administrative information, the so-called article header. It is very similar to the mail header format laid down in the Internet mail standard RFC-822, in that it consists of several lines of text, each beginning with a field name terminated by a colon, which is followed by the field's value.
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Usenet is not software. There are dozens of software packages used at various sites to transport and read Usenet articles. So no one program or package can be called "the Usenet software."
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