Imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days, as if people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. Or imagine the electronic equivalent of a radio talk show where everybody can put their two cents in and no one is ever on hold.
Unlike e-mail, which is usually one-to-one, Usenet is many-to-many. Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet their friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk about whatever's on their mind.
To many people, Usenet IS the Net. In fact, it is often confused with Internet. But it is a totally separate system. All Internet sites CAN carry Usenet, but so do many non-Internet sites.
Technically, Usenet messages are shipped around the world, from host system to host system, using one of several specific Net protocols. Your host system stores all of its Usenet messages in one place, which everybody with an account on the system can access. That way, no matter how many people actually read a given message, each host system has to store only one copy of it.
Usenet is huge. Every day, Usenet users pump upwards of 40 million characters into the system -- roughly the equivalent of volumes A-G of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called conferences, forums, boards or special-interest groups). There are now more than 8,000 of these newsgroups, in several diferent languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from science fiction to South Africa. Newsgroups are arranged in a particular hierarchy devised in the early 1980s. Newsgroup names start with one of a series of broad topic names. For example, newsgroups beginning with "comp." are about particular computer-related topics. These broad topics are followed by a series of more focused topics (so that comp.unix groups are limited to discussion about Unix). The main hierarchies are:
bionet - Research biologybit.listserv - Conferences originating as Bitnet
mailing listsbiz - Businesscomp - Computers and related subjectsmisc - Discussions that don't fit anywhere elsenews - News about Usenet itselfrec - Hobbies, games and recreationsci - Science other than research biologysoc - "Social" groups, often ethnically relatedtalk - Politics and related topicsalt - Controversial or unusual topics; not carried by
all sitesIn addition, many host systems carry newsgroups for a particular city, state or region.
The History of UseNet.
The Corporate Internet Explosion - Multimedia Services on
the Internet
Rodney Campbell
[Rodney.Campbell@Telstra.com.au]
(c) Copyright
1994 Telstra Corporation.
Last modified: Fri Nov 18 11:49:30 1994