What is Usenet ?

You can think of Usenet as a discussion forum where people get together to pour in their thoughts and ideas and discuss stuff on a range of subjects. Usenet, you could say, was here to stay much before the world-wide web came to prevail over human interactions over electronic methods of communication. For those who wonder 'what is Usenet', you could look at it as a basic file-sharing mechanism put in place by folks from the Duke University in the 1970's, where information could be shared, photos could be stored and matters could be discussed on-line. If you have heard of the command line, which formed the basis of communication before the mouse took over the on-line means of communication, you probably have a response to the question, 'What is Usenet?'

Usenet has historically been known under the 'pseudo name', if you would like, 'NEWSGROUPS'. However, the name 'NEWSGROUPS' may actually be a misnomer, in that it is not a group that is used for news distribution; rather, Usenet was used exclusively for discussions and file sharing. In line with the client-server mechanism, the Usenet had two parties to its operations – the NEWS READER and the NEWS SERVER. If you are looking for a piece of information on the Usenet and if you use your computer browser to fetch that information located in a server elsewhere, your browser becomes the News Reader and the system that you get in touch with for your information becomes the News Server.

What is Usenet as an idea? Usenet is nothing but an enormous global system of communication, discussion and file sharing, where millions of users from around the world get together to discuss their interests in thousands of different groups that have emerged out of hierarchies. The users have a program installed in their systems, which are called 'Clients', which work over the internet to request a program called the 'SERVER'. The Client program called the NEWSREADER connects to a remote server that provides the information requested by the client. The requested information could be in the form of texts or have 'attachments'. When you, as a client, send a piece of information to a discussion forum, you are said to have 'posted' the information. The attachment could be anything, ranging from text or photos or music, software or videos. These are embedded to the text of the articles that you send and are sent across along with what you post. These articles are then shared across the world for other Usenet users to view, discuss and contribute.

Problems associated with the way the usenet was being used have prompted some of the Universities to stop using the service. However, Usenet is still among the most popular uses of the internet.

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