Long Before the Web, There Was Usenet
10/30/2007
You may have noticed the Service Status (http://servicestatus.msu.edu) announcement that news.msu.edu will be removed from service on October 31, 2007. Some people may wonder what news.msu.edu is. Others will fondly remember news.msu.edu as a vital means of communication within MSU and across the planet. Although primitive in some ways, Usenet opened the campus to a world-wide web, long before the Web we know and use today.
Today we live in a world of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Download.com, WikiPedia and thousands of other sites that let people connect and to share information. Web-based forums and information repositories have largely supplanted Usenet. The volume of traffic on news.msu.edu has plummeted, to the point where it is time to shut down the service for good.
Variously called “Usenet,” “Usenet News,” “Network News,” or “Netnews,” the network distributes “articles” or “posts” from one “news server” to another via “news feeds.” Most posts resemble text-only e-mail, but a poster could encode binary data such as images. Usenet is organized into “news groups” with names such as sci.math or rec.arts.tv.soaps. The first word of the news group name specifies where in the topical hierarchy the group resides. “Sci” groups cover science; “rec” groups cover recreation. At Michigan State, we created an “msu” hierarchy to conduct discussions of local interest. Today activity in the msu group has virtually ended.
It was a primitive world compared to today’s Web, but millions of people around the globe read and posted articles filed among the thousands of news groups. At one point, news.msu.edu provided much of Australia with its daily news feed. It is hard to overstate how much useful information flowed over Usenet. If you had a complex problem with computers or technology — or sewing or cooking – you could likely find an answer on Usenet. We began to hear “I found an answer ‘on the Net’’”– and we started to depend on the Internet to make connections and to find answers.
In its own way, Usenet could support many of the activities that today we use specialized tools or Web sites to handle:
• You could create a focused local news group to support a class you were teaching; today you’d use a course management tool like ANGEL.
• If you had something to sell, you could post on a “for sale” news group, where today you might use Craig’s List or eBay.
• Many of the forms of communication you’d find today on a social networking site or a blog might’ve appeared on a news group back in Usenet’s heyday.
In order to read and post articles on Usenet, people employed “news reader” software. Unlike today, when a handful of Web browsers dominate the market, there were numerous news readers for DOS, for Macs, for UNIX systems, and even on mainframes. Some were more elegant than others. News readers improved with the evolution of graphical user interfaces. Most news readers allowed you to “subscribe” to groups of interest. You could fire up your news reader and quickly hop from one group of interest to the next. For those without access to a good news reader, there were even gateways between e-mail and Usenet.
The FAQ, or “Frequently Asked Questions” document, came into its own on Usenet. Often when new users arrive on a given group, they tend to ask the same set of questions, causing frustration for longtime members of the group. By compiling an FAQ and periodically posting it, the group had a place to which they could refer “clueless newbies.” A special group, news.answers, served as a repository for FAQs from other groups.
Many of the shorthand conventions that people use in text messaging today, such as smiley faces and frequent use of abbreviations such as “BTW” (by the way) and “IMHO” (in my humble opinion) evolved on Usenet and on similar networks such as mailing list servers and bulletin board systems. The term “netiquette” for “network etiquette” was coined, and of course someone put together an FAQ defining its parameters.
Usenet also became a medium for exchanging binary formats, for instance, alt.binaries.pictures carried photographs, drawings, etc. Long before file sharing on the Web, Usenet carried audio in various formats, including MP3. Eventually the network became a place to find video on the Internet.
Today many people use Web gateways, such as groups.google.com, instead of specialized news readers. So you can still explore Usenet after news.msu.edu shuts down, but it’s likely you’ll use the Web in order to participate.
Ed Kryda, team leader for the group in ACNS that managed news.msu.edu in recent years, said “I know there are a few people that will shed a tear for news.msu.edu, but its time has come.”
– Rich Wiggins
Usenet Service Being Removed from Service on October 31, 2007
10/11/2007
MSU’s Usenet Service (nntp.msu.edu and news.msu.edu) has provided access to Usenet newsgroups through a news server (when used with a Usenet news reader such as Outlook, Agent, MT-Newswatcher, etc.) for many years. Web forums and other Network News Transfer Protocols (NNTP) have grown in popularity, however, reducing the number of people using news.msu.edu.
Due to declining use, news.msu.edu will be removed from service on October 31, 2007. Members of the MSU community who use Usenet may want to pursue one of the readily available news browser services to read articles and post discussions previously done on news.msu.edu.
For more information contact the ACNS Help Desk at (517) 432-6200.
