| "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it" (Gene Spafford, 1992). |
Usenet is a decentralized, worldwide, peer-to-peer system for circulating newsgroup articles. It has grown somewhat chaotically from very small beginnings, mostly as a labor of love. Some unix programmers found out that they could do neat things to exchange information, and other programmers came along and expanded the capacities of the system.
The Big-8 Usenet hierarchies are only a small part of Usenet--currently 1992 out of tens of thousands of Usenet newsgroups.
Usenet depends on some of the same software and hardware as the Internet and it may be accessed through Internet browsers, but Usenet is quite different in structure from the Internet. Paradoxically, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the locus for discussing the next generation of standards for Usenet and the software used by many news servers is supported by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) and is called InterNet News (INN). Go figure!
There is no central administration of Usenet. All news administrators are autonomous sovereigns. No one (other than an employer) can tell a news administrator how to configure the news server. The Big-8 list of newsgroups is used by those news administrators who want to use it--and only to the extent that they choose to use it as a guide to what gets carried on their machines. All that the Big-8 Management Board can do is to make up the list of groups that we think should be used and hope that the majority of news administrators will agree with our recommendations.
| Usenet Links: |
|---|
| What is Usenet? -- rtfm copy of Spaf's post |
| What is Usenet? -- Spaf's original post |
| What is Usenet? A second opinion. -- Edward Vielmetti |
| What is Usenet? -- Mark Moraes, 1999 |
| Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) |
| ISC InterNetNews (INN) |
| ISC InterNetNews FAQ |
| The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) |
| Internet FAQ Archives |
| Graham Drabble's Web Site |
| Jan Schaumann -- Usenet is still a strange place |
| Open Directory Project -- Usenet links |
| Usenet II |
| A short history of the Big-8. |
A small sample of the RFCs Related to Usenet:
| Date & Author | Document / Site |
|---|---|
| 1987: Network Working Group | RFC 1036 |
| 1994: Henry Spencer | Son of RFC 1036 |
| 1995: David Wright | Guidelines on Usenet Newsgroup Names |
| 2004: Stan Barber | UUCP Project |
| 2006: Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) | Usenet Article Standard Update (usefor) |
| 2006: Russ Allbery | Usenet Hierarchy Administration FAQ (Allbery) |
| 2006: Russ Allbery | GROUP CREATION POLICIES |
