The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Usenet — The Real Internet Gordon Woolf

Wouldn't it be great if you could just post a question somewhere and get an answer! That was put to me as a rhetorical question, by someone who makes great use of e-mail and the World Wide Web, but who had completely missed a much older Network - Usenet - which is just what he needed.

Outlook Express, Netscape and Opera all have news readers built-in, but my favourite is Forte Free Agent (see Figure 2), a news reader that downloads the headers of all available messages in a newsgroup you choose, from which you can then select the messages you wish to download for reading offline. Any messages to which you wish to reply, or new messages you wish to post can be sent next time you connect to your ISP and run Agent.

Different Methods

Firstly a technical explanation: the World Wide Web is run over a packet-switching Network. Those Web pages come into your browser as small packets of data. The packets are all sent along the same cables and satellite links as many other packets, and they all have destination information added which is the address of your computer on the Internet. Upon arrival at your computer the packets are reassembled into the correct order and you see the result.

Usenet works differently; it is a store-and-forward system. The information typed is stored and then forwarded by your ISP, along with that typed by other users for other newsgroups. The forwarding happens at regular intervals which may be measured from seconds or minutes on the Web-based newsgroup services, to once or twice daily for the smallest ISPs.

Usenet is the place where the development of the Internet as a whole has been discussed. It is the place where the first announcement was made of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) that created the World Wide Web. Usenet is short for Unix User Network.

In the Beginning

Usenet is generally considered to have begun in 1979 as a series of shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina.

As more small Networks were connected to others, it grew in a less than systematic way. Early users tell of separate Networks in the same universities; networks that could not communicate directly, but could send messages via Usenet.

There's a tale of a particular department's VAX computer being unable to make a direct connection with the campus computer centre, which had a DEC-20 in the room next door. The machines were separated by about 30 feet and a piece of wallboard but the computer centre was not interested in stringing an RS-232 (communications) line between them. So, messages went twice across the US, involved three Networks and could take about a week.

It became a chaotic system and led to what is called the "Great Renaming" of 1986/87 which, as well as organising the newsgroups within Usenet, also created a backbone - an organised system of forwarding messages so they would arrive reliably, and relatively quickly. Usenet traffic started to move over Arpanet, and so the systems came closer, though things were not to stay that way for long.

Alternative Networks

A man named Richard Sexton proposed a newsgroup called "rec.sex" (followed closely by rec.drugs) and the group was approved by the informal system of asking existing newsgroup users to vote on whether such a group should or should not be allowed to exist. However, the controllers of the backbone said they would not carry the group. Almost immediately, the "alt" distribution was set up, using alternative routes that were separate from the backbone (and theoretically avoided using Arpanet). Alt.sex and alt.drugs were the first groups created and the next day came alt.rock-n-roll, completing the trio. The Backbone Cabal abdicated leaving a set of what were called the Holey Guidelines and a newsgroup known as the new.group to administer new groups. Discussion at this time proclaimed Usenet as the world's foremost example of a "working cooperative anarchy". This organisation, or lack of it, remains the way Usenet works.

Brian Reid, who established the alt groups commented later, that at the time he notified the backbone of their existence he didn't realize the alt groups were immortal: "In retrospect, this is the joy of the alt Network: you create a group, and nobody can kill it. It can only die when people stop reading it. No artificial death, only natural death."

And so to this day, you will find "alt" groups and other groups with other prefixes, on similar or identical subjects. While there are no rules, anyone who is perceived to have broken the etiquette (or "Netiquette") of a group will be howled down by others. Flaming is quite common. A flame is a posting harshly criticising a particular posting or the poster. A flame war is a continuing argument that becomes more and more emotional and less and less informative before dying out.

When a flame war begins, lurkers (people who read but never post) and newbies (new users) tend to run for cover and eventually everyone just gets sick of it and moves on to another subject.

Other Networks

Usenet, as I've said, was by no means the only Network. Others involved in this user group will be better able to recount the history of, for example, Fidonet, which linked bulletin board computers so that discussions on those systems could travel worldwide. Fidonet is a Network mainly of PCs to PCs, rather than involving the mainframe computers that provide the backbone of the Internet.

BITNET, the "Because It's Time Network" was started as a cooperative Network at the City University of New York and uses electronic mail systems and a mechanism known as a listserv to distribute information. Sending a message to a BITNET list results in that message being replicated and sent to all of the subscribers of that list. People can subscribe or unsubscribe to a list automatically by sending a message to a particular address.

Some bitnet groups will be found on Usenet, and are newsgroups where the postings (messages) are forwarded to a list server, which in turn sends the message as e-mail to all subscribers to that list. However, as spam became a problem on Usenet the open access of many such groups was restricted. As an example, while the newsgroup bit.listserv.pagemakr once provided open access to the PageMakr List (of which I am a co-owner or administrator), it is now a little-used newsgroup in which only those messages posted by list members who use their list subscription address when sending news, will be passed on to the full list membership.

Lists

Lists are another part of the Internet that some Net surfers never find. You send e-mail to the list server and your message is immediately passed on to all full list members, and once daily to those who subscribe to the list digest. Some lists are open, or unmoderated, while the membership of other, moderated lists may have one or more moderators who approve postings before they are exploded or mailed out.

Because of their requirement for users to subscribe and thus prove their address, Lists tend to become much closer communities, and as an example, as the owner of a small book publishing business, I found similar firms who now distribute my books in the USA and UK, through contact with similar publishers in those countries. This is the kind of contact between individuals across the globe that can happen in few other ways. Common interests also mean that the planned arrival of a list member on a holiday or business trip to another city or country is often an excuse for list members in that place to meet for a lunch or dinner.

More than WWW

So, there's a lot more to the Internet than WWW, and I've described just a few of what I've seen estimated as about a hundred Networks to which access can be gained relatively easily. Do a Google search for information on Archie, Gopher, Prospero... They included one called Janet, which, had things worked out differently could have made our language somewhat different. "Are you on Janet? I'll janet you then."

These are the Networks which help provide a guarantee that now worldwide communication between ordinary people has been established, it will be very hard to close off, no matter how much some governments may wish to do that. For example, if all fibre-optic and telephone lines in the world were to fail at once, the Web, with its high bandwidth packet-switching dependence might become too slow to be useful, but the store-and-forward parts of the Net would survive, through tens of thousands of packet radio operators and the Russian and American amateur packet satellites.

It can be well worth exploring the other Internet.

About the Author
Gordon Woolf is a longtime Melb PC member whose Web site is at http://www.worsleypress.com. He is a co-owner of the PageMakr e-mail list hosted by Purdue University, Indiana.