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messaging /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ (Or "Usenet news", from
the people who post and read articles thereon. Originally
implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom
Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, and supported
mainly by
Unix machines, it swiftly grew to become
international in scope and, before the advent of the
information utility in existence.
Usenet encompasses government agencies, universities, high
schools, businesses of all sizes, and home computers of all
descriptions. In the beginning, not all Usenet hosts were on
the Internet. As of early 1993, it hosted over 1200
newsgroups ("groups" for short) and an average of 40
megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of
new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and
flamage every day. By November 1999, the number of groups
had grown to over 37,000.
To join in you originally needed a
news reader program but
there are now several web gateways such as
Deja. Several
web browsers include news
readers and
URLs beginning "news:" refer to Usenet
newsgroups.
articles between servers, though this is probably rare now
[Still? URL?]
(1999-12-17)