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A diagram of Usenet servers and clients. The blue, green, and red dots on the servers represent the groups they carry. Arrows between servers indicate newsgroup group exchanges (feeds). Arrows between computers and servers indicate that a user is subscribed to a certain group and reads or submits articles.Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.
Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980.[1] Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; and can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another in so-called news feeds. Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by their Internet service provider, university, or employer.
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[edit] Introduction
Usenet is one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University,[1] over a decade before the World Wide Web was developed and the general public got access to the Internet. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET," employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through the newly developed news software such as A News. The name USENET emphasized its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation.[2]
The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance,
Friday 1 October 2010
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