Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration with the group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always available; and reading the messages does not require a mail or web client, but a news client.
While the term "blog" was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it. Before "blogging" became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists [1] [2] and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
So for instance newsgroup rec.arts.sf.starwars.games would be in the rec.* top-level Usenet hierarchy, where the asterisk (*) is defined as a wildcard character. There were seven original major hierarchies of Usenet newsgroups, known as the "Big 7": comp.* — Discussion of computer-related topics; news.* — Discussion of Usenet itself
Users only upload one or a small number of files at a time, but all peers are forced to seed to other peers from the parts of a file they have received so far. Initially, programs did not include a search function, so indexing sites sprung up. Downloads for popular files tend to be faster than on many other networks.
The primary reason for the Great Renaming was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups. [1]An alternative explanation was that European networks refused to pay for some of the high-volume and low-content groups such as those regarding religion and racism; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups.
The cabal was created in an effort to facilitate reliable propagation of new Usenet posts. While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only operated during night time to save on the cost of long-distance communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a day.
The birth of the alt.* hierarchy is tied to a drastic transformation of the Usenet, the Great Renaming of 1987. The "backbone carriers", or the backbone cabal as they have been referred to by some users of the Usenet, were vital hubs in the distribution chain of most of the newsgroup postings. Their effort to change the way newsgroups are ...
Because UUNET started with a loan from Usenix and controlled the e-mail addresses for moderated Usenet groups, it was hard to block email traffic to or from Usenet. In 1997, UUNET had lost so much credit that on 1 August, after finding alternate routes for moderated newsgroups, a Usenet death penalty (UDP) was issued against UUNET. [8]