[ih] distributed network control: Usenet

[wfms at wfms.org]

On Sun, 25 Jul 2021, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:

> On Jul 20, 2021, at 3:45 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> BTW, it’s available via Google Groups <https://groups.google.com/>.  Some newsgroups go back to the early 1980s.

Indeed, the older archives were donated to Dejanews between a number of 
folks, before Google acquired them.

INN is still being actively developed and seeing use at some USENET sites.

wfms