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
