Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

Usenet
     
         /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://www.deja.com/)}.  Several {web browsers} include news
        readers and {URL}s 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
         with "help" in the message body.
        [Still?  URL?]
     
        {(http://www.openmarket.com/info/internet-index/current-sources.html)}.
     
        {Notes on news
        (http://www.ifi.uio.no/~larsi/notes/notes.html)} by Lars Magne
        Ingebrigtsen .
     
        [Gene Spafford , "What is Usenet?",
        regular posting to {news:news.announce.newusers}].
     
        (1999-12-17)