Introducing Usenet

Usenet is one of the earliest Internet applications. Most people think of the Internet as just e-mail and the Web, but Usenet was around long before the World Wide Web. Usenet is based on the idea of the computer bulletin board, the way people who had computers communicated with each other before the invention of the Internet.

Bulletin board software allowed people to dial into a central computer (run by someone “running a bulletin board”) and post messages. People also could download their favorite games, software, and messages sent to them by others. Some bulletin board software even allowed people to chat with one another. Usually, in the middle of the night, bulletin board programs would dial out and connect to other bulletin boards transferring messages until they eventually hopped their way to the intended recipient. This was known as store and forward. This method of transferring messages became the foundation of the way e-mail and Usenet groups work today. They both use the store-and-forward method for transferring messages. E-mail works by hopping a message to the intended e-mail server and stores it there until someone contacts the server and downloads the messages. This way, messages can be sent without the recipient’s computer being connected to the server, which in the old days of computers, they rarely were. For this reason, you can find many parallels between the way e-mail and Usenet both operate.

Internet researchers at Duke University created a store-and-forward system for posting messages based on topics, and the topics are organized into a tree-structured hierarchy. For example, the top of one of the trees is called sci. No one posts directly to sci, but the sci group has subgroups, all related to science. Each subgroup is connected to its parent group name by a dot. For example, sci.math is a Usenet group for people interested in mathematics. Subgroups also can have subgroups. This group is for people interested in electronic design: sci.electronics.design. There is a catchall group named alt. The alt (alternate) group contains just about anything you can imagine: alt.battlestar-galactica, for example.

Messages sent to these groups are sent to Usenet News servers (technically called NNTP servers). Usenet News was the full name of the Internet application, and the servers are often simply called News servers. They never really carried breaking news as you may think of news, but they certainly contained news related to very specific topics.

You can send only text to Usenet servers. Wait! Don’t throw this book into the fire just yet. Yes, you can download images, sound files, programs, and even video from Usenet groups, but they are first encoded into text, the form they take when being stored on Usenet servers. Usenet client programs, simply known as newsreaders, decode the text and change the graphics, binary programs, videos, and sound files back into their original form.

No matter what your interest may be, with tens of thousands of active groups and more than 100,000 archived groups, chances are high that you’ll find what you’re looking for in one of these groups. Being able to search through these groups is an amazing resource.

Google Groups is more than a Web-based interface to the Usenet News groups. It also includes groups created by Google members. Using Google Groups, you no longer need to use a separate newsreader program to view the contents of a group, post messages to the group, or even create your own group. In fact, you can’t access Google’s groups using a newsreader. You can only use the Web interface at http://groups.google.com.

Note 

Google does not fully participate in Usenet. Groups created by Google users do not become part of Usenet. They remain part of Google Groups. You can’t access Google-created groups using a newsreader program, and they don’t appear on other NNTP servers.

You can think of Usenet as a subset of Google Groups. To truly participate fully in Usenet, you need access through a different NNTP server. Usenet service is offered by some Internet service providers. These services usually offer only a limited subset of the groups. For full access to all the groups, you can search the Web for Usenet servers and find a list of services that charge a small fee to access all the groups. You need a newsreader like the one installed in Outlook Express to access these groups.