usenet

                                                                                         USENET

Usenet (user network) 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 newagroup. There are thousands of newsgroups and it is possible for you to form a new one. Most newsgroups are hosted on Internet-connected servers, but they can also be hosted from servers that are not part of the Internet. Usenet's original protocol was UNIX-to-UNIX Copy (UUCP), but today the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is used.

Most browsers, such as those from Netscape and Microsoft, provide Usenet support and access to any newsgroups that you select. On the Web, Google and other sites provide a subject-oriented directory as well as a search approach to newsgroups and help you register to participate in them. In addition, there are other newsgroup readers, such as Knews, that run as separate programs.

Usenet began in 1979 as a bulletin board between two universities in North Carolina. Today, there are more than 50,000 newsgroups, and news can be read with a news-enabled Web browser, popular newsreader applications such as News Rover (www.newsrover.com) or via venerable Unix-based utilities such as pine, tin and nn.

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