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What is
USENET? It is a
collection of user-submitted notes or messages on various
subjects that are posted to servers on a worldwide network. Each
subject collection of posted notes is known as a
newsgroups. There are thousands of newsgroups and it is
possible for you to form a new one. Most groups are hosted on
Internet-connected servers, but they can also be hosted from
servers that are not part of the Internet. The original protocol
was UNIX-to-UNIX Copy (UUCP),
but today the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
is used.
Usenet is mostly accessed via
newsgroup readers, such as Outlook Express, that run as separate
programs.
USENET HISTORY
The idea of network ( Usenet ) news
was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom Truscott and
Jim Ellis, thought of using UUCP to connect machines for the
purpose of information exchange among users. They set up a small
network of three machines in North Carolina.
Initially, traffic was handled by
a number of shell scripts (later rewritten in C), but they were
never released to the public. They were quickly replaced by
``A'' news, the first public release of news software.
``A'' news was not designed to
handle more than a few articles per group and day. When the
volume continued to grow, it was rewritten by Mark Horton and
Matt Glickman, who called it the ``B'' release (a.k.a. Bnews).
The first public release of Bnews was version-2.1 in 1982. It
was expanded continuously, with several new features being
added. Its current version is Bnews-2.11. It is slowly becoming
obsolete, with its last official maintainer having switched to
INN.
Another rewrite was done and
released in 1987 by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer; this is
release ``C'', or C-News. In the time following there have been
a number of patches to C-News, the most prominent being the
C-News Performance Release. On sites that carry a large number
of groups, the overhead involved in frequently invoking
relaynews, which is responsible for dispatching incoming
articles to other hosts, is significant. The Performance Release
adds an option to relaynews that allows to run it in daemon
mode, in which the program puts itself in the background.
The Performance Release is the
C-News version currently included in most releases.
All news releases up to ``C'' are
primarily targeted for UUCP networks, although they may be used
in other environments as well. Efficient news transfer over
networks like TCP/IP, DECNet, or related requires a new scheme.
This was the reason why, in 1986, the ``Network News Transfer
Protocol'', NNTP, was introduced. It is based on network
connections, and specifies a number of commands to interactively
transfer and retrieve articles.
There are a number of NNTP-based
applications available from the Net. One of them is the nntpd
package by Brian Barber and Phil Lapsley, which you can use,
among other things, to provides newsreading service to a number
of hosts inside a local network. nntpd was designed to
complement news packages such as Bnews or C-News to give them
NNTP features.
A different NNTP package is INN,
or Internet News. It is not merely a front end, but a news
system by its own right. It comprises a sophisticated news relay
daemon that is capable of maintaining several concurrent NNTP
links efficiently, and is therefore the news server of choice
for many Internet sites.
Today, Usenet connects tens of
thousands of sites around the world, from mainframes to PC's.
With thousands of newsgroups and untold thousands of readers, it
is perhaps the world's largest computer network. |
