Usenet - History

History

UUCP/Usenet Logical Map, original by Steven McGeady.

Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott. In 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through UC Berkeley which had connections to both Usenet and ARPANET. Michael Horton, the graduate student that set up the connection, began “feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet” with the “fa” identifier. As a result, the number of people on Usenet increased dramatically; however, it was still a while longer before Usenet users could contribute to ARPANET. After 32 years, the Usenet news service link at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (news.unc.edu) was finally retired on February 4, 2011.

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