Usenet
More info
- Creator
- Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis
- Released
- Type
- Protocol / forum
- Spec
- RFC 3977 (NNTP)
- Wikipedia
- en.wikipedia.org
Decentralised discussion forum system from 1979 (Duke University) — predecessor of web forums, BBSes and Reddit. Newsgroups organised hierarchically as comp.lang.c, rec.music.misc, alt.binaries.*.
Protocol: NNTP (RFC 977/3977). The "Big 8" hierarchies (comp, sci, news, soc, talk, misc, rec, humanities) moderated via RFC process; alt.* anyone could create. "Spam" was born here (Canter & Siegel, 1994), along with much of net culture.
Still alive in 2025 mainly for alt.binaries file sharing (RAR/PAR packages, NZB indexers). The discussion side has been dead since Google Groups swallowed dejaNews and then lost interest.