Usenet gave the internet spam, flames and FAQs before the web existed
More than a decade before the World Wide Web, two graduate-school friends in North Carolina built a way for computers to swap public discussions over ordinary phone lines. Usenet had no central server and no owner, yet it spread worldwide and coined words people still use daily, including spam, flame, FAQ and sockpuppet.
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis came up with the idea in 1979, and the system went live the next year, connecting Duke University with the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina. It rode on UUCP, a cheap dial-up method of copying files between Unix machines that earned the nickname the poor man's ARPANET. The name was short for users' network, chosen partly in the hope that the USENIX organisation would help run it.
What made Usenet unusual was its lack of a middle. Anyone could run a news server, and each server passed new posts along to the servers it was paired with, which passed them on again until a message had copied itself across the whole network. Early sites often dialled in only once or twice a day, usually at night when phone calls were cheaper, to exchange batches of articles. Posts looked much like email, except that anyone whose server carried a group could read them rather than a named recipient.
Conversations were sorted into newsgroups arranged in subject hierarchies, so a mathematics group and a physics group sat together under a science branch. Replies stacked into threads that could branch like a tree; a question about the best yeast in a winemaking group might sprout several side debates over a few days. The first commercial spam came from two immigration lawyers, Canter and Siegel, advertising green card services.
Forums, blogs and social media have since eclipsed it, but Usenet never shut down. It now travels over the internet on port 119, or port 563 when encrypted, requires no sign-up, and its binary file groups remain heavily used for moving data around.
Source: Usenet
