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Usenet was originally conceived as a simple bulletin board (read:
announcement distribution system) built around the UUCP (Unix to Unix
Copy Protocol). Essentially, a mainframe would run a news daemon or
script that would open a connection to other mainframes and copy all
the new posted messages so that each had everything. Users attached
or remotely logging in to the mainframes could then browse the
messages. It basically operated just like like the email protocol
SMTP, except the messages were intended to be public rather than
addressed to a person (e.g. they were addressed to the "newsgroup"--a
particular directory in the Usenet tree--instead of to a user @ a
host). As the size of Usenet grew exponentially, it quickly became
impractical to deal with all the messages. Enter the Personal
Computer. Now many people were running their own boxes rather than
relying on a direct connection to a mainframe. In terms of Usenet,
this meant the larger servers would continue to copy the news as they
always had, but smaller servers and PCs would log in specifically to
download only the newsgroups that the user or group of users was
interested in. Software began to evolve for better managing this
transition, the newsreaders or newsbrowsers. Usually, news software
then and now would let the user choose or "subscribe" to the
newsgroups the user would like to read, and then would periodically
download only recent messages from these groups (to be more specific,
the software wold download all the headers for subscribed groups,
present them to the user, and the user would pick specific messages to
download, saving much bandwidth). Special newsreader software also
made easier the process of encrypting messages or encoding files to
text for attachment. It was the file attachment protocols that
allowed Usenet to be truly the first Peer-to-Peer File Sharing system.
Around the advent of the WWW, more and more people poured onto the
Internet --though instead of being connected through a university,
government office, or technical department of a large corporation,
they were getting online through private ISPs. At first, most of
these ISPs provided a Usenet server just like the universities and
such, however with so many users now posting messages and files,
running a Usenet server required formidable bandwidth and storage
space. Cheaper ISPs came about that did not offer this service, or in
some cases would save bandwidth and storage by running a limited
newsserver. Some free servers popped up, but they limit bandwidth and
may disconnect a user altogether during peak times, and in some cases
do not even offer all the newsgroups. Thus, the birth of commercial
newsservers, such as UseNeXT, which would offer full access to their
large, fast newsserver in exchange for a fee. From reading UseNeXT's
advertising in particular, it would seem they are playing up Usenet's
use as a Peer-to-Peer File Sharing system and are offering software to
facilitate accessing Usenet for this (i.e. the software probably has
features for automated searching and downloading of binaries on
Usenet).

-d

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