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Definition: Usenet


(USEr NETwork) A public access network on the Internet that provides group discussions and group email. It is a giant, dispersed bulletin board that is maintained by volunteers who provide news and mail feeds to other nodes. All Usenet content is "NetNews," and a running collection of messages about a subject is a "newsgroup."

Humble Beginnings
Usenet began in 1979 as a bulletin board between two universities in North Carolina. Today, there are more than 50,000 newsgroups, and news can be read with a news-enabled Web browser, a newsreader application or via Unix-based utilities such as pine, tin and nn. See newsreader, newsgroup, NNTP and Google Groups.