(
USEr
NETwork) A public access network on the Internet that provides group discussions and group email. It is a giant, dispersed bulletin board that is maintained by volunteers who provide news and mail feeds to other nodes. All Usenet content is "NetNews," and a running collection of messages about a subject is a "newsgroup."
Humble Beginnings
Usenet began in 1979 as a bulletin board between two universities in North Carolina. Today, there are more than 50,000 newsgroups, and news can be read with a news-enabled Web browser, a newsreader application or via Unix-based utilities such as pine, tin and nn. See
newsreader,
newsgroup,
NNTP and
Google Groups.