Sometimes, you really don’t want to send email to a specific person. You may not want to send it to a specific group of people. You want to communicate to anyone who might be able to answer your question.

There are a number of communities that exist only in the Internet as forums — places where you post a message for others to read and to which they can reply. These forums resemble the Bulletin Board Systems of the early days of modeming, before the Internet was opened to the public.

Another major way to post messages is via a large, distributed bulletin-board system called Usenet. Anyone with access to a newsfeed, which is available from most ISP’s, and a compatible program (Outlook Express does Usenet) can read and post to “Usenet news.”

First, a little lookback at history. Usenet began 1979. Today’s Usenet travels the Internet using the NNTP protocol (Net News Transport Protocol), which was developed in 1986.

I ran into Usenet in 1986, when a friend merged a Usenet newsfeed into his bulletin board system. I read it for a couple of years, and got really active in 1989 when I started my own news server — a bulletin board program called Waffle, running under DOS, then Windows 3, then 3.1, then DRDOS, then Win3.1 running on DRDOS, and finally under OS/2. My 386sx-16 computer got its news and email feeds via dialup (at 2400bps) from someone who dialed up to someone who actually connected directly to the Internet. Wow, that was living.

In the mid-90′s, a website called Deja News began to accumulate all the news into a huge, searchable archive. When Deja News (later called Deja.com) finally folded, they had obtained a significant archive of individual postings. Google bought Deja.com’s Usenet archives and has made the available for easy searching via Google Groups (http://groups.google.com). Google’s Usenet archive has postings dating back to 1981.

Whatever you call it, the news servers that make up Usenet circulates many thousands of messages across the Internet to carry each individual’s posting to all the other news servers. Like a large forum on a website, Usenet (generally just called “News”) has a few different categories for posting of your messages — just a few, 54,284 of them to be exact, or at least that’s the number that news.east.cox.net carried yesterday. Your first step is to download the full list of newsgroups to your newsreader. Your second step is to pick the ones in which you are interested. You “subscribe” to a newsgroup, but that “subscription” is only you telling your program which newsgroups to monitor.

Your ISP may carry all the newsgroups, most of them, some of them, or none of them. If your ISP does not offer newsgroups, there are some third-party news servers that are relatively cheap.

There are also more complete services, like Giganews News Server Access which I use, that offer plans with long retention times for posts and large bandwidth allowances (up to unlimited!). If you’ve ever used your ISP’s usenet servers, you know about missing messages or missing a single segment that is part of a 20 part post.

Continue reading Usenet = Internet News = News Groups