[ih] distributed network control: Usenet

[Toerless Eckert]

Alas, i also stopped using public usenet  groups almost 2 decades ago
(after operating it myself for almost 2 decades).

At the office, we still used email list mirrors into private usenet groups just
to be able to use the usenet tooling (NNTP and newsreader) instead of
tenths or hundreds of users subscribing to the very same mailing lists,
but ultimately,  with the trend from unix CLI to Windows/Mac/Browser
user-interfaces, that tooling benefits pretty much vanished.

AFAIK, for the last > 10 years, public usenet is primarily for distribution
of likely often legally questionable large, segmented binary content.
AFAIK, relatively few specialized ISPs are still offering usenet as
a chargeable service for access to this content.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 03:45:12PM -0700, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> Jack Haverty wrote:
> > What I was referencing was a non-technical design decision -- the notion
> > that there shouldn't be any single person, corporation, or organization
> > "managing the network".   The ARPANET, and IIRC all other networks of
> > the day, were under a single organization's control.
> 	
> The Usenet had no central point of control, and was contemporaneous with
> the ARPANET and early Internet.  Its software was even rewritten several
> times by different parties (e.g. A News, B News, C News, Notesfiles,
> NNTP).  Its global discussion groups (net.foo) were evolved by mutual
> agreement (comp.foo, sci.bar, etc) and then later successfully forked
> (alt) when the primary sites feared hosting discussions that others
> wanted to have (e.g. on sex and drugs).
> 
> Does anybody know the status of the Usenet today?  I got off it
> years ago.
> 
> 	John
> 	
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> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

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tte at cs.fau.de