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What is USENET?
It is a collection
of user-submitted notes or messages on various
subjects that are posted to servers on a
worldwide network. Each subject collection of
posted notes is known as a
newsgroups. There are thousands of
newsgroups and it is possible for you to form a
new one. Most groups are hosted on
Internet-connected servers, but they can also be
hosted from servers that are not part of the
Internet. The original protocol was UNIX-to-UNIX
Copy (UUCP),
but today the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
is used.
Usenet is mostly
accessed via newsgroup readers, such as Outlook
Express, that run as separate programs.
USENET HISTORY
The idea of network
( Usenet ) news was born in 1979 when two
graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis,
thought of using UUCP to connect machines for
the purpose of information exchange among users.
They set up a small network of three machines in
North Carolina.
Initially,
traffic was handled by a number of shell scripts
(later rewritten in C), but they were never
released to the public. They were quickly
replaced by ``A'' news, the first public release
of news software.
``A'' news was
not designed to handle more than a few articles
per group and day. When the volume continued to
grow, it was rewritten by Mark Horton and Matt
Glickman, who called it the ``B'' release
(a.k.a. Bnews). The first public release of
Bnews was version-2.1 in 1982. It was expanded
continuously, with several new features being
added. Its current version is Bnews-2.11. It is
slowly becoming obsolete, with its last official
maintainer having switched to INN.
Another rewrite
was done and released in 1987 by Geoff Collyer
and Henry Spencer; this is release ``C'', or
C-News. In the time following there have been a
number of patches to C-News, the most prominent
being the C-News Performance Release. On sites
that carry a large number of groups, the
overhead involved in frequently invoking
relaynews, which is responsible for dispatching
incoming articles to other hosts, is
significant. The Performance Release adds an
option to relaynews that allows to run it in
daemon mode, in which the program puts
itself in the background.
The Performance
Release is the C-News version currently included
in most releases.
All news releases
up to ``C'' are primarily targeted for UUCP
networks, although they may be used in other
environments as well. Efficient news transfer
over networks like TCP/IP, DECNet, or related
requires a new scheme. This was the reason why,
in 1986, the ``Network News Transfer Protocol'',
NNTP, was introduced. It is based on network
connections, and specifies a number of commands
to interactively transfer and retrieve articles.
There are a
number of NNTP-based applications available from
the Net. One of them is the nntpd package by
Brian Barber and Phil Lapsley, which you can
use, among other things, to provides newsreading
service to a number of hosts inside a local
network. nntpd was designed to complement news
packages such as Bnews or C-News to give them
NNTP features.
A different NNTP
package is INN, or Internet News. It is not
merely a front end, but a news system by its own
right. It comprises a sophisticated news relay
daemon that is capable of maintaining several
concurrent NNTP links efficiently, and is
therefore the news server of choice for many
Internet sites.
Today, Usenet
connects tens of thousands of sites around the
world, from mainframes to PC's. With thousands
of newsgroups and untold thousands of readers,
it is perhaps the world's largest computer
network.
Glossary
of Usenet Terms
If
you are New to Usenet or require more Usenet
Information, we recommend
Usenetservices.com
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