| 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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