What is Usenet?

senior writer Jonathan Strickland, and I'm more than meets the eye. Okay, So Chris and I just moments ago, uh we're sitting here in front of the microphones talking about Internet relay chat. So that podcast may or may not have have published by the time you hear this, but during that we said, you know, we should really talk about another really important part of the Internet that predates the World Wide Web, but it's still around and uh, it's still playing a role.

It's maybe not nearly as as a big role as it used to, but it's something that that we felt needs to be addressed in an episode. Do you want to tell them what it is? Yes? Oh? Now, yeah, use net, use net. Yeah. As as a matter of fact, one of the things that we mentioned in the other podcast, um and and several of the podcasts we've had in the past, is that not all the traffic on the Internet goes from place to place using the same method. Um. You have emailing, you have the web, UM, you have

file transfer protocol, UM. But in UH, in the case of using net, it has its own protocol to deliver UH news files, or at least that's what it was used for initially. Yeah, it's kind of UM. It's funny because the terms that we're used to kind of define what use net was early on stuck around, even when you might argue that it's more like a message board, like an old If you go to a website that has a message board, a lot of the message board stuff that you'll see on their kind of owes a

lot to the early use net days. And UH it relies on a Unix to Unix copy protocol that was the original writ call for use net. So you use CP is what we abbreviate that as, or acronymicize. I'm just gonna I'm acronemonious. UM. Yeah, that actually that actually changed m Yeah, because I mean if it had just stayed Unix to Unix, then that would have really limited the usefulness of use net. It would have been useless net. Well,

relatively useless net. Well, and you can actually you can actually use the web for uh for a lot of this now, so I mean you can. There are some uses of using net that you really don't even need a specific client, although you can still get them. But later, a later class um sorry, later protocol that they developed to provide use net services is n NTP or Network News Transfer Protocol, right um, and that that became the

way of deliver bring messages UH for US net groups. Now, uh, these are in a way it's kind of hard to describe a US net group to someone who's never seen one. But if you think about, um, maybe a discussion board on one of your favorite websites, it's sort of like that. Um, the the there is a board where there is a topic, um, say, you know, fans of Beverly Hills nine o two one oh, for example, and people can post messages pro or con there just about anything for which there is a fan.

On one of these use net groups, you will find people who are trolling. They're posting how much they cannot stand whatever it is that other people are a fan of, right, and that this other thing that is probably not related to the first thing at all. Is obviously better. Oh yes, So for example, I might jump into the Star Trek uh fan discussion and talk about how Star Wars is so much better than Star Trek and may not even be that. I believe that, it's just that I decided

I wanted to stir up some trouble. So yeah, actually, us that's we can get into where where how how much usen has contributed to the culture of the Internet. Trolls are one of the things that first started really popping up right around the days of eusenet. Let's let's kind of go back a bit. Let's talk about the development of eusnet. Okay, so I'm assuming you're getting ready to mention Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis and as I do it first, Oh yes, those guys, Um, yeah, so

they kind of came up with this idea. This was ah, these were two graduate students with Duke University at the time and the time being nineteen seventy nine, and uh, they were thinking that they needed to update an older, uh model of of accessing information through the computer system. UM, that would be the old BBS model or Bolton board system now Bolton board systems. I actually used these when I was a kid. I mean I would log into them. But a bolton Board system is much more limited than

you snet bolton Board system is. You would you would not I remember dialing into them. You would use your modem to dial in a specific phone number. You would log into the bolton Board system, which is hosted on a remote computer, and there you could uh interact with other users by by posting to a discussion board. Um, you could play games, you could transfer files, you could upload stuff or download stuff, a lot of things that

you can do on the web now. But it was very limited in that it was only stuff that was on that one computer. It's not like you had access to everything on every bolton Board system. So every bolton Board system had its own culture, its own selection of files, its own message boards. Also, it had a very limited number of people that could be logged in at one time. Uh. Normally it had like a series of lines open, like phone lines open that could be occupied before it reached capacity.

And if you called when it was at capacity, you couldn't get in. You'd have to wait, And which seems weird now. Just imagine if you were to open up your your web browser and you were told sorry, the Internet is full. You're gonna have to wait until some people log off before you can access it. But uh so, yeah, it was just it wasn't like a network really. It was you were all using one computer as almost like a node, right, yes, and you you had a you know,

it was acting as a server. Your computer was acting as a client. But there was no network. It was just client server. That's it. Like a hub and spoke right exactly, exactly. Yeah, the the host computer is is right there at the very center, and then you're you and all the other computers are on the edge connecting in. So you would post messages to the hub and then other people could read them and reply to them. And all the information was there at that one central location exactly.

And if that one central location went down, then everything was gone, ye until it came back up again. Usnet is different. Usenet is more of a network system, and so, uh Trustcott and Ellis had come up with this idea of creating a system that would exist across multiple servers.

It would all be based on the same protocol and you would build a essentially a message board, a news group that where you could post articles about whatever subjects you wanted and have discussions about those subjects, and UH servers would contact one another and compare essentially their their message boards, and anything that one server was missing, the other server would send to it so it could update its own its own database, and vice versa, so that

no matter what happened to any one single server machine, you would still be able to access that information because it would exist somewhere on the network, assuming that they had synchronized somewhat recently. So UH it also meant that you didn't have all these isolated conversations going on across

multiple bulletin board systems. That's what was happening before. Like you might have a very strong fan community in Los Angeles for Star Trek, Well let's just stick with Star Trek, and then you have another really strong fan community and say in New York City also about Star Trek. But they wouldn't necessarily be logging into the same bulletin board system, especially if they were using dial up modems, because they don't want to pay long distance to have to connect

to it, So their conversations would all be regional. USENET allowed a global conversation to occur because you're no longer worrying about logging into one specific local computer. So it

was a revolutionary idea. We take it for granted now because the Worldwide Web has been around for a couple of decades, but at the time it was, there was this idea of, hey, we've already got the lines here connecting all these computers, and we've got the protocols that support this kind of data transfer, the whole T c P I P protocols. Let's build something on top of this infrastructure that allows us to share information. So the same sort of idea that eventually became the World Wide Web,

but in a totally different implementation. Okay, then, so there are literally tens of thousands of using net newsgroups available and they're still you know, that's it's still in in pretty wide use. UM. You know that recently, I've i've my most recent exploits on usinget UM. I've found several UH communities that are are basically just spam magnets UM, but there are still quite a few that are that are very very popular UM. And using that actually has

a hierarchy to it. Yeah, that hierarchy wasn't always part of usenet's history. In fact, the problem was that as more and more information was being added to usenet, it became difficult to navigate through all of it to see the stuff that's relevant to your own interests, and so they needed to come up with a scheme that would allow people to post relevant things in discussions and make it easier to find what you're interested in, so it

wouldn't become an exercise and frustration. Part of that fell to a group of people that became known as the Backbone Cabal. That's really what they were known as, and and that yeah, well, and some people argued that it was sneaky and that the choices they made were not representative of the community as a whole, something that we see like in the background of wikis all the time. Now,

the same sort of problems happened with wikis. Whenever you have a big, wide, open UH community, than any one group making decisions is going to upset someone in that community because it doesn't represent them. Right, So the cabal decided, all right, well, we need to try and UH and start um to organize this in a more efficient way. And that leads up to, in nineteen seven, an event called the Great Renaming Gasp. Yeah, so and the great renaming. That was when things had come to a head on usenet.

It was getting far too chaotic and they needed to find a way of creating a hierarchy that made sense. And that's when they started making the the what was initially called the Big Seven. Yes, it's the Big seven hierarchical hierarchical groups. So you had things like COMP c O MP for for any sort of computer discussion, comp dot and then you could put something behind the dot to specify, so you could do like comp dot hardware and then if you want to get more specific, you

do COMP dot hardware, DOT monitor. So you would be able to you know, break these down into subcategories so that people could have very specific conversations and not have to worry about, you know, cluttering up one comp thing with every single computer topic no demand. And there were other categories as well. There was you know s c I for science UM. There was originally there was talk, which was supposed to be kind of a catch all category,

but it was also monitored. This did not sit well with some users because it meant that you couldn't have true free communication, free speech because someone somewhere was monitoring what was going on and could except or deny any particular topic. Uh, which then led to what has become probably the most famous or perhaps infamous hierarchy in usenet alt ALT, which was not part of the Cabal. In fact, that was a big, big selling point for the whole

alt things. What made it so popular so quickly. It's kind of anything and everything really yeah, alt dot whatever. It's Brian Reid is the guy who kind of spearheaded that project to to create and he was one of the people who objected to this idea of the cabal backed high archies, saying that you know, if we if we do this, it limits us too much. We need it to be more open than that. And uh, this was a place where frank discussions could be held on

any topic. Like reeds point was that he wanted to open up a a topic under wreck r e C which is for recreation uh dot drugs. He wanted to create a topic for that to have discussion about drugs drug use and was denied. Um. He was not allowed to create a talk dot drugs group either, So he decided to create this alt hierarchy, so so you know, just circumventing the whole system and creating a new uh, a new division that has nothing to do with the

Big seven. Um. And it took off. In fact, it took off so much that it is the largest of the categories, which is kind of ironic because all of course stands for alternative, right, but now every ing else is the alternative because it's the main thing. Kind of like alternative music was in the mid nineties or exactly exactly, the alternative music was the only thing out there. There was no alternative. Yeah, and using grungy And that's the thing is if you dirty hippie type seattle the thing,

go ahead, are you done? I was a punk rocker. You and China anyway, so umtally was so welcome. So yeah, I mean that's that's a good point. You can't just say, you know what, I wanna start a discussion topic about my band and just go start a group. Uh, not instantaneously. You can put it up for a suggestion and uh and you know, once people have had a chance to look at it and say, oh, well, you know, I think that would be a kay or I don't think

that would be okay. You know, it can become a group. Um, but it's it's not like starting a a an Internet relay chat channel where you go, you know what, I want to talk about this right now, and just go start a channel. You have to actually have it approved um by by the powers that be, which really are

kind of decentralized anyway. It's kind of weird. Frankly, again, I think the the comparison to wikis is fairly apt because wikies are often maintained by a community of users and UH, and they often resist any attempts at any single user trying to dictate policy. We we saw that not that long ago actually with Wikipedia, where the co founder Jimmy Wales went to try and delete material from the Wikimedia Commons collection UM in in hoping to head

off any problems with with sponsors for Wikimedia. UH. And as a result because of his because he didn't go through the proper procedures and he bypassed the whole community aspect, UH, there was a big kerfuffle over at at Wikipedia. Yeah. And the same sort of thing happened on usenet all the time and still does probably in some of these uh and some of these news groups. It's not like it's it's not really a democracy, UM. And the people

in charge aren't really completely in charge. It's you know, it's a it's a little strain, it's a little wild West out there. But you know, I think I think the people who are are really getting the the or nay votes are too people who have been established and

really entrenched in the usneture. Well, we we've mentioned earlier that trolls were one of the uh you know, they kind of emerged from usenet, and one of the most common trolli ish tactics on usenet was to log into any particular discussion forum and then start talking about something that was completely off topic. And you're doing it on purpose.

You're doing it specifically to upset people. Or you would log into a discussion group about a particular topic and then start asking inane questions, or start asking legitimate questions and then slowly have them morph into more and more inane questions, just to see how far you could push people, how long you could get people to respond to you before they caught onto that it was all a joke and uh, trolls really the whole purpose was just too In most cases anyway, um, the purpose was just for

their own amusement to try and wind people up, see how upset they could get them, or just see if they could play a joke. Not all of them were malicious. Some of them were really just pranks, you know, They're more mischievous than malicious. And then there were others where you would get people who were fans of one particular UH discussion group and they would get real rivalries with other discussion groups and would actually go in and spam.

That's another thing that came out of use spam. The earliest the instances and naming of spam came from that and people just coming in and posting ridiculous stuff. Because that's another you know, if you post enough to use net, you start to UM, you start to scroll content off of use net. Yes, because it only had a limited amount of space to store UM data. And if you went in and posted enough stuff, you could push data off of use net and then people wouldn't be able

to access it anymore. Yes. UM. And since people were using us neet to do things like not just have conversations, but to host files UM where you could you know, especially things like uh uh material that's under copyright UM. There's tons of piracy that you can find on use net of various kinds of materials yea. And that was one of the things that that struck me as odd because UM, I used most of my use net use was way back in the early to mid nineties UM.

And then a few years ago I heard people starting to talk about using Actually one of my favorite software of shareware developers came out with a brand new use that client, and I was thinking, really, people are still using that, And then I realized the correlation between that and my Internet service provider putting a cap on the amount of data that you could receive over use net because I was thinking, since when did use that traffic

becomes so uh, you know, such an issue. And then then I realized that I learned about the binaries groups because you can break down a file into multiple pieces and spread it out over multiple messages, and and the messages are threaded. I neglected to mention earlier because that's how you sort of follow the topic, is that they're responding to posts and you can you can thread them together and see, you know, where the conversation has gone.

We can also do that with binary files, and that's how you know, rather than using something such as bit torrent for example, people were shared ing uh, cracked files or binaries of of other media that you know, people were going on us it's and I think it's sort of escaped attention simply because using net was old in

terms of the Internet. Yeah, you could. You could find stuff software, images, music, that kind of thing, provided of course, your i SP isn't blocking those groups, which it it doesn't necessarily your your i SP doesn't have to carry

access to to use that they could block it. And if they are blocking access to those groups, you may not see them, you know, right in and go my SP doesn't have those Well, maybe your IP is blocking and they're they're i s p s that would just put anything that falls under alt binary as you know, they block it automatically, um, which you know, that's that could be frustrating because there usenet was a way of

being able to share legitimate open source software. So it wasn't just stuff that was pirate ID or you know that that was being illegally shared. There was there were legitimate uses to to uh to log in to all binaries that had nothing to do with piracy stealing intellectual property. But you know, it gets really really hard to separate

all of that out. And uh so most companies, most I s p s, if they're going to block it, would just rather paint with a broad brush than than to try and have to determine, okay, well is this is this group all right? And is this group not all right? And why? And that's just one part of I mean, the piracy was one part. Pornography is another big, big thing on housnet, or at least it used to be. UM. So there are some come I s p s that would just block all the the groups that had anything

to do with pornographic content. Um. And I remember when I in the nineties, when I would log into usenet and look at the different groups, I was kind of shocked at how many were dedicated to that in various forms, especially when you're like, you know, obviously my education doesn't extend as far as these people would, as I would have sworn that three of these groups are saying the same thing, but they're all arguing that it's something unique, and I'm scared to see what they mean. You know,

it reminds me of a song. Um yeah, so maybe we should just drop that part of this. So so earlier I mentioned um that in general, you would want to to get a Usenet reader, a client software client to do this and that, and that's generally the way you're you're going to go to get you know, more

recent postings. But there was a website that used to archive, uh, postings from usenet and um and yeah, that's as you were mentioning earlier, Jonathan also, um, usually the server will basically slough off the old messages as the newer ones come in to save space. They only say save up to a certain point. Um. Well, as people were archiving them, there was a website called dejan News that was keeping

track of all this. And if you were looking for something in particular, um, and it was you know, from five years ago or something like this, and you know you saw this posting in this news group and you didn't save a copy, Um, you might go to dejan news do this. Well, they were acquired by a larger company, um, which you may have heard of. Is it Yahoo? No? No, that Facebook, Twitter, It's gotta be Google. Yes, yes, it

became Google Groups and uh. They Google has has managed to to keep um dejan news archives up and running under the Google Group's banner, and there is quite a lot of Internet history chronicled in the pages of Google groups. Yeah, they've got a really really fun little uh timeline too, Yeah, where they can tell you little things like uh, like in auguste on usenet, there's the first documented review of the ibm PC. Yes, and uh they have the first

mentioned of MTV you had June nine two. Uh, Actually it's right after that, the first mention of Star Wars episode six. Yeah, that would be a return of the Jedi. Actually, if it's the first mention, I bet then they called it Revenge of the Jedi. They might indeed have. And so yeah, there are a lot of really cool little first in here, like the February first me to post, which would become a vain in people's existences of me too, because it doesn't have had anything of benefit to the discussion.

It's just you wanting to Hey, I've been quiet for a while and I need to talk now, me too. Um. And then the most most important post in August four, the first mention of the Commodore amiga. Oh yeah, of course. How also July first mention of Bill Clinton h as well, before he would become never mind, I'm not gonna go there, No there's there's tons and tons of of information in there. Um you could you could basically track you can even

track the first dot com um Internet company. Back to when Brad Templeton mentioned clarinet um yep, I got like the first mention of A O L the first mention of the Simpsons. I mean, it's it's kind of you know, granted, this is just a list that Google's compiled. It's not like it's it's comprehensive, but it's just kind of a fun little thing of seeing how you know, the development

of various technologies, cultural icons, that kind of thing. Um Like, remember then, yeah, Tim berners Lee introduces the Worldwide Web, which that was, you know, whatever happened that it's it's it's still around uman. As it turns out, the Worldwide Web would would take a big chunk out of usenet traffic because a lot of the stuff eventually moved over to the web, where you'd be able to find the same kind of discussion groups or uh not usually in

in the same sort of format of usenet. I mean, usnet was a catch all, right, it was it was an enormous place to have discussions where you could discuss practically anything. You can probably find a topic for whatever it was you wanted to discuss somewhere on use net and you still probably can. You might have to do a little picking and choosing on on the different groups, and it may not be that there are that many people discussing it these days on the on the world

wide Web. Now, of course you'll find niche websites that that might cover a small sliver of what you might see on use net um. But but you know, it's still there's still some of that hanging around the web.

Because it actually kind of in a way reminds me of what an RSS aggregator does, because rather than going to a niche website to have a discussion with people about different topics, all kinds of different topics that you were interested in, you'd have to go individually to those websites you could if people were still using it like they used to go to use net. Check your reader and see the ten groups that you're really passionate about in one play ace and then go through the messages

for each one, make replies and things like that. Make you know, it's kind of a predecessor to r S S readers. Yeah, I mean it's it just struck me how similar those those were, and when you mentioned that the niche websites. But it does have that advantage and it does have a sort of a community feel to it, um where I didn't used to Why you have a strange lookin I just saw another thing on on the date list that made me smile. Okay with that July

Terry Pratchett's first post on a dot fan Dot Pratchett. Yes, so we're talking about that on the I r C podcast, if you know, and if you want to go back and listen to that or wait until it publishes, whichever, we don't know. That's funny. Were referred in each of these to the other one. So one of them is going to have an Easter eggain. It's kind of recursive anyhow,

you'll get caught in a vicious cycle. But it's it was it's really formative in the in the way that it's sort of transition people from bulletin boards to the Internet culture. Yeah, creating the whole the whole platform or a global conversation about various topics, which you know, the web has kind of taken that torch and and has run with it, ran with it, but yeah, it's it's you know, Usenet is where you see the seeds of that.

So definitely an important part of the development of the Internet and Internet culture, you know, like we were saying before with the whole trolls and the spam. Other things really got started on Usenet that have become very popular on online. Things like emoticons um not necessarily started on Usenet, but it became popular there. And and some of the various acronyms like b r B for b right back

and uh a FK for away from keyboard. You would even you know, occasionally people would get into discussions where it was happening about as close to real time as you could manage on Usenet. I mean, it's not like it was instantaneous. It wasn't like a chat program, but people would still do that where they would post a message and we're like, you know what, I'm gonna check back in half an hour and see if if if Bob has responded to this, because he was just on

and I've just responded to his message. Neat stuff. Indeed, we'll have to talk about some other really important various protocols, programs, things like that. That have been part of Internet history that we maybe don't think about that often, but are still you know, instrumental and where we are now why not? Yeah, because that's kind of what we do. And if you guys have anything you would like us to talk about specifically, you can email us. Our address is tech stuff at

how stuff works dot com. And until then, Christina taught you again. Really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com And be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready, are you