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by Steve Burnett
Usenet is often confused with the Internet, but Usenet isn’t the Internet. Usenet is not a network, but a service carried over the Internet, as well as many computers not directly part of the Internet. The best way I’ve found to describe Usenet is twenty thousand (or so) bulletin boards, each with a different title describing what the topic for that board is supposed to be. You can look for a bulletin board with a topic you think you might be interested in, and read some or all of the messages on the board that day. If you want to, you can put a message up to either reply publicly to someone else’s message or to start a new discussion. You can also copy a person’s address down, and send him or her a private letter that won’t appear on the board. Later, you can come back and see if there are any new and interesting messages from other people.
Usenet is unlike a party telephone line because you don’t deal with other people in real-time. You can’t interrupt someone while he is thinking of what to write on the board (you could, however, repeat his message afterward and quote him out of context; but besides being rude, that’s not the same as interrupting him and preventing others from hearing his words). Usenet is very like a party, though, because there’s very little control over who can say something. If a person insists, for example, that squirrels are the only warm-blooded animals that cannot carry rabies, he can post that message. Of course, people who know this is false can reply with the correct information. Then while the first person can continue to insist he is right, the rest of the readers of that board are likely to start ignoring messages from the first person.
NOTE: For information on the history of Usenet, use Netscape to go to http://www.yahoo.com/Reference/FAQs/ for several FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) concerning Usenet.
Back in the dark ages of computing (circa late 1970s) a version of UNIX labeled V7 was released. One of the applications included was UUCP, which stands for Unix-to-Unix-CoPy. In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University started using UUCP to exchange messages between two systems at the university. Next, a set of shell scripts was developed to exchange messages between Duke and the network at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later, the shell scripts were rewritten in C, and they have been rewritten and extended many times since then.
To quote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, “Space is BIG. Really BIG.” Usenet (as of this writing) is approximately ten thousand different newsgroups, with several million total participants. Some of these newsgroups are dead, and no one ever posts to them. Some newsgroups are highly active, and are likely to split into multiple newsgroups soon (either because no one can keep up with the sheer volume or because a large segment of that newsgroup is interested in a narrower subset of topics than the other readers of the newsgroup).
An example of newsgroup spawning happened in comp.sys.powerpc, a newsgroup devoted to discussions of the PowerPC RISC processor. When Be, Inc. announced the BeBox, a dual-processor workstation running a new operating system, a substantial fraction of the newsgroup focused exclusively on Be’s hardware and software. To accommodate both the interests of the people who wanted to discuss the BeOS and the wishes of the people with no interest in the BeOS, a newsgroup called comp.sys.be was formed. Alternatively, a topic discussion such as “undocumented features of the PowerPC processor family” would be of interest to the entire newsgroup, and the information generated from this discussion might become a large section of the newsgroup’s FAQ or a separate FAQ altogether.
Although the sheer volume of Usenet can appear overwhelming, there is some logic to the structure. Table 27.1 presents some of the first-level divisions of Usenet. A first-level identifier appears as the leftmost part of every Usenet name.
| Hierarchy Name | Description |
|---|---|
| biz | Business |
| comp | Anything to do with computers |
| misc | Miscellaneous |
| news | Usenet issues, general information |
| rec | Recreational (sports, crafts, hobbies) |
| sci | Scientific |
| soc | Social (personal, cultural) |
| talk | Conversation on anything |
| alt | Everything else |
There are other first-level identifiers for newsgroups, many of which tend to be regional. For example, a newsgroup with a name starting with de.* is generally populated by speakers of the German language, and most of the de.* hierarchy deals with Germany and European issues.
The alt.* hierarchy of newsgroups is an enormous part of Usenet. The requirements for creating an alt.* newsgroup are easier than the requirements for creating a major hierarchy newsgroup. In addition, the alt.* newsgroups are not always carried by every Internet access provider, for two reasons. The first reason is bandwidth: the alt.* newsgroups are a substantial portion of all Usenet newsgroups, and some of these—especially the newsgroups devoted to binary files of either applications or images—can take up enormous amounts of bandwidth. The second reason for restricting distribution of the alt.* newsgroups is offensiveness: The alt.* newsgroups tend to tolerate more extreme or obnoxious language and topics than the mainstream newsgroups, and people are more likely to be offended by their content.
NOTE: Some Internet access providers have a “user-defined” policy for Usenet access: They will provide groups from the full Usenet newsgroups list, but they will carry only newsgroups the users of that network have asked for. This “a la carte” policy substantially reduces the actual bandwidth of the Usenet feed required for the network, but the users’ interests are not restricted or censored. Other Internet access providers have a mixed policy: They will carry only groups that they approve of AND that their users ask for.
If you are new to Usenet, you should make sure the newsgroup news.announce.newusers is on your subscription lists. Basic informational guides about aspects of Usenet are periodically reposted to this newsgroup every two weeks.
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