Capitan_Picard

Rayner: We have no idea if anyone in Green Day has heard of Usenet, but you might enjoy knowing that the 16th of January this year was the 10,000th of September 1993

There's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Glad to see you're getting back to it. What apps would you recommend to get back into Usenet? I lost my floppies many, many moons ago.

Jason: Thunderbird is the most prevalent. Pan is great on Linux.

Tristan: Back in 1998 some denizens came up with a proposal for Usenet II, which was intended to mitigate a lot of the spam issues without sacrificing (too much of) the decentralized nature of the original Usenet. Sadly, the plans never came to fruition. Tackling spam on Usenet has instead taken the form of cancelbots, moderated newsgroups, and (lately) waiting for spammers in general to lose interest.

What was the big/main idea behind the creation of Usenet and how long did it take for the creation of Unsenet?

Jason: It started as a research project between UNC and Duke University in late 1979. It was a way to get a private network between these schools who didn't have ARPAnet access. in 1980, it was presented at the USENIX conference and took off from there.

Rayner:

Usenet grew fast after its initial launch. There were 3 participating sites in 1979, 100 sites in 1981, over 500 by 1983, and 940 by 1984. Most early adopters were universities and tech companies, each of which might have dozens or hundreds of users.

Tristan:

Usenet quickly attracted a user base in the millions, and by 1984 it was estimated to account for 85% of all network traffic at participating sites. At its peak in the late 1990s, Usenet was seeing 20,000 people post 300,000 unique messages per day, amounting to some 2 GB of new text daily.