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In late 1979, two graduate students at Duke University began considering how to connect UNIX computers so that they could exchange text messages. Another grad student at the University of North Carolina became involved in this effort and wrote the first news transfer system, which consisted of a collection of shell scripts. This software was installed on the first two Usenet sites, unc and duke. In early 1980, another computer at Duke, phs, was added. The news software was eventually rewritten in C for public distribution. This became known as the A News software.
As the news software grew in popularity, it quickly became obvious that the current news transport software couldn’t handle the increasing flow of news. Programmers at the University of California at Berkeley began to rewrite the current A News software to increase its capabilities. This new version, known as B News, was released in 1982.
Throughout this time, news articles were being transferred by using the UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Program (UUCP) protocol. As more sites joined the news network, the network load grew to unmanageable levels. Soon realizing that UUCP no longer worked as the main transport protocol for news, people began looking to the Internet and the TCP/IP protocols for help. In 1986, a software package was released that implemented the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP). This protocol is defined in RFC 977. NNTP allowed news articles to be exchanged by using TCP/IP instead of the slower UUCP protocol. It also allowed users to read and post news from remote machines so that the main news processing software didn’t have to be installed on every computer.
When NNTP became available on the Net, the already rapid growth of the Usenet system exploded. The current news-processing software, B News, quickly became too slow to handle the increasing news flow. In 1987, Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer of the University of Toronto developed a new news-processing software, C News. Then, Rich Salz developed a news transport system known as INN, one of the most widely used news servers on the Internet.
The Usenet news system continues to grow at a rapid pace. Other commercial information service providers are now carrying Usenet news as part of their online services. Several BBS networks, such as FidoNet, also carry Usenet news.
NOTE: An excellent reference for the history of Usenet news is the news article “Usenet Software: History and Sources,” by Dr. Gene Spafford. This article can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/software/part1/.
There are literally many thousands of newsgroups. How many, exactly? Well, nobody knows for sure—well over 20,000. There are thousands of groups on virtually every topic, and that number is growing every day. The topics range from silly or pointless to focused and precisely helpful.
With so many different newsgroups, it would be a nightmare trying to find information on the subjects that you were interested in if the newsgroups weren’t organized in some way. Usenet newsgroups are organized in a hierarchy based on subject. The names of the newsgroups are made up of subnames, each separated by a period. These names go from a general category to a specific category as you read the name from left to right. At the top of the hierarchy are several standard group categories, plus lots of specialized categories. These standard categories are well established. Table 34.2 lists the top-level groups standard categories in the Usenet news system.
| Class | Description |
|---|---|
| comp | Many different computer-related topics |
| misc | Miscellaneous topics that don’t easily fit into another category |
| news | Various topics that relate to the Usenet news system itself |
| rec | Recreational and hobby subjects |
| soc | Social issues |
| sci | Various scientific topics |
| talk | Subjects designed for ongoing conversations |
As with everything else on the Internet, there are exceptions to the rules in Table 34.2. Many other top-level hierarchies exist; most are devoted to different regions of the world. For example, the ba and triangle group hierarchies are concerned with topics of interest to the San Francisco Bay area and the North Carolina Research Triangle Park area, respectively.
One of these additional group hierarchies deserves special discussion. The alt hierarchy has very relaxed rules for newsgroup creation. Virtually anyone can create a group under the alt hierarchy; however, creating a newsgroup under any other top-level group is extremely difficult. The alt hierarchy carries many newsgroups that discuss topics that are out of the mainstream of society. In fact, many people find some of the topics in the alt hierarchy to be objectionable. Many Net debates on censorship have started because sites decided to ban part or all of the newsgroups in the alt hierarchy.
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