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Usenet: Usenet Newsgroup
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Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post e-mail-like messages (called "articles" or "posts") to one or more of a number of categories, called newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums which are widely used today.
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Usenet Newsgroups were around before the Internet became public. The key thing to know about newsgroups is that there are more than 30,000 of them, and you may not have access to all or any of them. You subscribe to a newsgroup through your Internet or corporate network host provider and they decide what newsgroups they will allow on their system. Therefore, you only have access to the newsgroups that your provider subscribes to. For instance, if your provider decides not to allow commercial newsgroups, then you won't be able to subscribe to biz.misc or biz.comp.accounting.
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As mentioned earlier, Usenet is structured hierarchically. The main top-level hierarchies are alt, comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk. Furthermore, there are hierarchies for each country, the country code of which precedes the international equivalent. For example, de.comp.os.linux.misc would be the German speaking equivalent to comp.os.linux.misc8, just as fr.comp.lang.c is the French equivalent to comp.lang.c. In addition to the country (or rather language) specific newsgroups there are now a large variety of other top-level hierarchies such as free.*9, gnu.* and news.*, as well as commercial or ``company-related'' newsgroups.
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Usenet and newsgroups may seem simple to the casual observer, but system administrators who have to manage Usenet on their system or run a newsgroup know otherwise. Spencer and Lawrence share information that previously had to be learned online, providing system administrators with a detailed guide to Usenet management. They tell you how to choose between C News and INN, the two major contenders for Usenet software. Then they show you how set your software up and make your daily operations as trouble-free as possible.
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Usenet discussions are sorted by topic into different broad categories known as hierarchies, which are filtered into specific discussion groups called newsgroups. A simple example of a common Usenet hierarchy is sci.* which contains only scientific subjects. An example of a newsgroup in this hierarchy would be sci.med.emergency, which is focused on discussing emergency medical science, exactly as the name implies. Beyond science, the other hierarchies found on Usenet are:
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Usenet encompasses government agencies, universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes, and home computers of all descriptions. In the beginning, not all Usenet hosts were on the Internet. As of early 1993, it hosted over 1200 newsgroups ("groups" for short) and an average of 40 megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day. By November 1999, the number of groups had grown to over 37,000.
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