usenet

3 definitions found

usenet - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  Usenet
  Usenet news
  
     <messaging> /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ (Or "Usenet news", from
     "Users' Network") A distributed bulletin board system and
     the people who post and read articles thereon.  Originally
     implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom
     Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, and supported
     mainly by Unix machines, it swiftly grew to become
     international in scope and, before the advent of the
     World-Wide Web, probably the largest decentralised
     information utility in existence.
  
     Usenet encompasses government agencies, universities, high
     schools, businesses of all sizes, and home computers of all
     descriptions.  In the beginning, not all Usenet hosts were on
     the Internet.  As of early 1993, it hosted over 1200
     newsgroups ("groups" for short) and an average of 40
     megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of
     new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and
     flamage every day.  By November 1999, the number of groups
     had grown to over 37,000.
  
     To join in you originally needed a news reader program but
     there are now several web gateways such as Deja (http://deja.com/)
     .  Several web browsers include news
     readers and URLs beginning "news:" refer to Usenet
     newsgroups.
  
     Network News Transfer Protocol is a protocol used to
     transfer news articles between a news server and a news reader
     .  The uucp protocol was sometimes used to transfer
     articles between servers, though this is probably rare now
     that most sites are on the Internet.
  
     Stanford University runs a service to send news articles by
     electronic mail.  Send electronic mail to
     <netnews@db.stanford.edu> with "help" in the message body.
     [Still?  URL?]
  
     (http://openmarket.com/info/internet-index/current-sources.html).
  
     Notes on news (http://ifi.uio.no/~larsi/notes/notes.html)
      by Lars Magne
     Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>.
  
     [Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>, "What is Usenet?",
     regular posting to news:news.announce.newusers].
  
     (1999-12-17)
  

usenet - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  Usenet
   /yoos'net/, /yooz'net/, n.
  
     [from `Users' Network'; the original spelling was USENET, but the
     mixed-case form is now widely preferred] A distributed bboard
     (bulletin board) system supported mainly by Unix machines. Originally
     implemented in 1979--1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott,
     and Steve Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to become
     international in scope and is now probably the largest decentralized
     information utility in existence. As of late 2002, it hosts over
     100,000 newsgroups and an unguessably huge volume of new technical
     articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day (and
  that
     leaves out the graphics...).
  
     By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the original UUCP
     transport for Usenet was fading out of use -- almost all Usenet
     connections were over Internet links. A lot of newbies and
  journalists
     began to refer to "Internet newsgroups" as though Usenet was and
     always had been just another Internet service. This ignorance greatly
     annoys experienced Usenetters.
  

usenet - V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (June 2006) :

  USENET
         USErs' NETwork (Internet)