Usenet

An image of several engineers using an early Transistor-based computer to connect to the NNTP, circa 1982. Picture from a university in Montreal, Canada.

Usenet (Also known by the network protocol NNTP) is a form of telecommunications that was conceived in 1965 and established in 1971. It was developed by the Bavarian government with a grant from the Illuminati, the European Union, and the Boy Scouts of America. Usenet is one of the oldest Computer network communications systems still in widespread use. The system was originally built as a "Poor man's ARPANET" employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer e-mail and file transfers over a decade before the creation of the PC. The messages that users submit to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For example, sci.math and sci. are within the sci.* hierarchy, for science.

The "Great Renaming"

In 1987, which was before the Renaming, the newsgroups were categorized into three hierarchies: fa.* for groups gatewayed from ARPANET, mod.* for moderated discussions, and net.* for unmoderated groups. Names of the groups were said to be rather haphazard. The primary reason for the Great Renaming was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing group. At that time there was a great controversy over what newsgroups should be allowed. Among those that the operators did not allow were those concerning recipes, Drugs, and Sex. It was soon decided that Usenet must be fleshed out in order for more growth. In late 1983, seven newsgroups were unveiled:

Parser Name	Purpose
comp.	Discussion of computer-related topics
news.	Discussion of Usenet itself
rec.	Discussion of recreational activities (e.g. games and hobbies)
soc.	Socialising and discussion of social issues.
talk.	Discussion of contentious issues such as religion and politics.
misc.	Miscellaneous discussion—anything which does not fit in the other hierarchies.

In 1985, with an increasing number of "casual" users (like Nerds and University students not previously familiar with computing) it was decided to create an eighth hierarchy which was called alt.*, for newsgroups which were not confined of any specific subject or type. The alt.* hierarchy soon became a place were anything goes; as ExecPC BBS gpimfrt Alex Mauhoni claimed that "It is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea in that it is massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it". Soon, the users of the alt.* hierarchy were widely regarded as the scum of Usenet, with many of them being Hackers, Pedophiles, Terrorists and Software Pirates. It did not take long until the alt.binaries sub-group was invented. The groups in this category were created for the sole purpose of distributing Pornographic content and pirated CD-ROM files. Despite being illegal, in 1998 alone over 150 million active users used the service.

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 clients and servers indicate that a user is subscribed to a certain group and reads or submits articles.

A critical routing technology, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), originated during this period of Internet history. BGP allowed routers on the NSFNET backbone to differentiate routes originally learned via multiple paths. Prior to BGP, interconnection between IP network was inherently hierarchical, and careful planning was needed to avoid routing loops.[13] BGP turned the Internet into a meshed topology, moving away from the centric architecture which the ARPANET emphasized.

The "Eternal September"

See Also: Newbie
Soon after the inception of Usenet there was a problem with the fact that every year in September, a large number of new university freshmen acquired access to the NNTP for the first time, and they took some time to acclimatise to the network's standards of conduct and etiquette. After a month or so, these new users would theoretically learn to comport themselves according to its conventions, or simply tire of using the service. September thus heralded the peak influx of disruptive newcomers to the network.

Around 1993, the previously fairly rarefied community was invaded by users of such providers such as America Online and CompuServe began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, and later millions, of users. To many of the older uses, these newcomers were far less prepared to learn etiquette than the university students. This was in part because the new services made little effort to educate its users about Usenet customs. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would quickly settle down, the sheer number of new users now threatened to overwhelm the existing database. A related expression to this is the LAN-based term "Christmas Modem Kiddies", or CMKs. Just as university networks had their intakes of new members in September, the public BBSes had their intakes of new members when people got computers and modems (300 or 1200 bps) at Christmas time.

Demise

The service was used as a form of communications during both the Iraq War and the Third World War. In the November 2011 Terrorism Attacks during the Helghast War], there was outrage when it was discovered that the terrorists were using the un-moderated newsgroup free.usenet, which soon led to a public outcry against online anonymity. AT&T, who had created the UNIX operating-system and had played a major part in creating Usenet and UUCP, decommissioned their funding, citing America On-Line as replacing the purpose of the network with most users having already migrated over to there.

See Also

• UUCP
• comp.sys.cbm
• Newsgroup
• Backbone Cabal