LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Usenet
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Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was established in 1980, following experiments from the previous year, over a decade before the World Wide Web was introduced and the general public got access to the Internet. It was originally conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET," employing UUCP to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software. This system, developed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, was called USENET to emphasize its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation (Daniel et al, 1980).
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Usenet is not an organization. Usenet has no central authority. In fact, it has no central anything. There is a vague notion of "upstream" and "downstream" related to the direction of high-volume news flow. It follows that, to the extent that "upstream" sites decide what traffic they will carry for their "downstream" neighbors, that "upstream" sites have some influence on their neighbors. But such influence is usually easy to circumvent, and heavy-handed manipulation typically results in a backlash of resentment.
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Early versions of Usenet used Duke's A News software. At Berkeley an improved version called B News was produced by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton. With a message format that offered compatibility with Internet mail and improved performance, it became the dominant server software. C News, developed by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, was comparable to B News in features but offered considerably faster processing. In the early 1990s, InterNetNews by Rich Salz was developed to take advantage of the continuous message flow made possible by NNTP versus the batched store-and-forward design of UUCP. Since that time INN development has continued, and other news server software has ... been developed.
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The very nature of Usenet promotes change. Usenet was born outside of established "networks" and transcends any one physical network. It exists of itself and through other networks. It makes possible the distribution of information that might otherwise not be heard through "official channels." This role makes Usenet a herald for social change. Because of the inherent will to communicate, people who do not have access to Usenet will want access when they become exposed to it, and people who currently have access will want Usenet to expand its reach so as to further even more communication. Usenet could grow to provide a forum through which people influence their governments, allowing for the discussion and debate of issues in a mode that facilitates mass participation.
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The first thing to understand about Usenet is that it is widely misunderstood. Every day on Usenet the "blind men and the elephant" phenomenon appears, in spades. In the opinion of the author, more flame wars (rabid arguments) arise because of a lack of understanding of the nature of Usenet than from any other source. And consider that such flame wars arise, of necessity, among people who are on Usenet. Imagine, then, how poorly understood Usenet must be by those outside!
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The history of Usenet is so closely linked to the history of the Internet itself and the history of Unix (and ... Linux!), that it is worth to spend some time finding out how things started. Let us take a trip back into the year 1976 (a good year, I might add4) - the place, how could it be any different, AT&T Bell Laboratories, where a new utility called ``Unix To Unix Copy Program'' (or short: UUCP) had just been developed. UUCP was designed as a simple and efficient way of copying files between computers via phone-lines, and while nowadays UUCP has been superseded by TCP/IP based protocols, it still lay the foundation for what became known as ``the poor man's ARPANet''.
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