Chuq Von Rospach

Usenet, a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that were developed after the introduction of the World Wide Web. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.