Usenet is Still a Strange Place

Who ever said that Usenet is dead? It most certainly is not. Even though Usenet has changed its face over the last, say, ten years, the simple idea of exchanging ideas and having discussions among a large number of people by posting articles on a global messageboard has perpetuated. Yes, for those of you who still don't know what this is all about, we are talking about newsgroups, an important part of the Internet, albeit one heavily neglected by the media who usually equate Internet with Word Wide Web. The spread of the Internet, the increased availability to more and more households, has not only influenced the way we shop, trade stocks, etc., but has also transformed the old messageboard system of Usenet. But rest assured, no matter how much things have changed over the last few years, Usenet is still a strange place.

This strange place has, for a long time, been regarded as inhabited only by full-time geeks, nerds with Coke-bottle glasses trying to download obviously fake pictures of naked celebrities when they are not busy discussing the technological details of the Starship Enterprise's Warp-Drive.

But while these people certainly exist, there is another side to Usenet: with more and more people getting on the Internet it is true that on the one hand the signal-to-noise ratio has been lowered, which is why some people might say that “Usenet is dead”. On the other hand, more and more people are exchanging ideas, helping each other out and having highly interesting discussions that take place every day in this community. If you invest a little time, I'm sure I can convince you that Usenet is quite alive.

The history of Usenet is so closely linked to the history of the Internet itself and the history of UNIX (and thus Linux) that it is worth while to spend some time finding out how things started. Let's take a trip back to the year 1976 (a good year, I might add)--the place, how could it be any different, AT&T Bell Laboratories, where a new utility called “UNIX To UNIX Copy Program” (UUCP) had just been developed. UUCP was designed as a simple and efficient way of copying files between computers via phonelines, and while nowadays UUCP has been superseded by TCP/IP based protocols, it provided the foundation for what became known as “the poor man's ARPANet”.

ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), created by the US Department of Defense in 1969, was originally limited to computer scientists with Department of Defense contracts—not everybody could just go “willy-nilly over the ARPANet”. Aside from these connections, in order to join ARPANet one needed quite a bit of cash—assumed numbers ranged up to $100,000.

In 1979, two Duke University grad students started using UUCP to enable people to exchange information by uploading (posting) a message to a designated subject area called a newsgroup. Following a simple bulletin-board approach, subsequent messages would appear in the same newsgroup and messages regarding other topics would appear in a different newsgroup. This message system became known as Usenet News (UNIX Users Network). Using UUCP, everybody, even poor students, were able to use this system without being connected to the ARPANet.

The shell-scripts used by these two students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, were later rewritten in C for public distribution and named the “A” release of news. If you consider how much traffic goes through an average full-feed newsserver nowadays, it is amusing to know that this A release was designed for not more than a few articles per group per day.

This small number of messages posted each day evolved into what became its own culture of shared information and support as more and more groups of core sites were linked together. In the year 1981, UUCP and ARPANet, up until then still independent, were linked together by Berknet (at the University of California at Berkeley). Other universities and colleges developed their own networks, such as BITnet (Because It's Time net—a geek's affection for witty acronyms has a long tradition), which was based on the IBM protocol and developed by Yale and the City University of New York.

As these various networks were linked together, Usenet had the form of a graph, and Network maps were drawn. The news software was rewritten and became the “B” release. Networks were developed and linked, and in brief, things were changing quickly. More and more forums were established, and it became clear that more structure was needed—it was time for the Great Renaming.

Figure 1. An Early Map of Usenet, ca. 1980