Usenet
Usenet: To explain the true history and story behind what is usenet would be a long extension of a wikipedia entry that would leave all of us with our head spinning around.
Usenet, aslo commonly known as newsgroups, in general is a distributed internet discussion system that was started by two college students thinking themselves the next Alexander Graham Bell and assistant (and probably fighting over who was the big shot and who was the assistant) messing around with sending messages to each other using short, systematic methods using never before used technology.
They not only suceeded in there goal, but inadvertently created a system that is now bigger than either of them could have imagined.
No record if they still use the same usenet system they created.
This same computer network communication system is still one of the largest, internationally used systems in the world since the 80s.
Moving from college campuses, it began to be adopted by the big wig tech companies that started springing up and all the Bell's jumped on board as soon as they could. That caused a rush of new users to jump aboard, mostly those linux geeks that you see drinking a frapuccino at your local Starbucks. Becuase of the method it uses, its most commonly used with a program that can load and decipher these binaries into a readable and understandle way. Albeit more complicated even at that time of BBS's (yeah, your probably too young to remember those days), it was a way of sending larger packets of information than most BBS would allow.
And since it worked on a different channel than BBS to send and receive information, it made the whole connection issue a problem of the past. We could talk about the complicated methods it uses to work, such as 7bit ASCII character sets, uusencode from Unix uuscp packages, with header extensions and Base64/MIME encodings, but thats just entirerly too boring to get into. The fun part is that it was the meeting ground for such people like Tim Berners-Lee who announced this little event called the launch of this "WORLD WIDE WEB" thing, and even where Linus Torvalds (the geek from Starbucks), announced Linux. Since those days, it has been a breeding ground of information between both individuals and large scale companies to share information in a way that still rivels any of its competitors. It is why we here at NEWSDEMON exist.
Back to USENET Terms