/yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ Users' Network.
A distributed bulletin board system supported mainly by Unix machines and the people who post and read articles thereon. Originally implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to become international in scope and is now probably the largest decentralised information utility in existence.
Usenet encompasses government agencies, universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes and home computers of all descriptions. As of early 1993, it hosts well over 1200 newsgroups ("groups" for short) and an average of 40 megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day. To join in you need a news reader.
Not all Internet hosts subscribe to Usenet and not all Usenet hosts are on the Internet but there is a large overlap.
Network News Transfer Protocol is a protocol used to transfer news articles between a news server and a news reader. The uucp protocol is sometimes used to transfer articles between servers, though this is probably less common now that most backbone sites are on the Internet.
Stanford University runs a service to send news articles by electronic mail. See here or send electronic mail to <netnews@db.stanford.edu> with "help" in the message body.
Notes on news by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@ifi.uio.no>.
[Gene Spafford <spaf@cs.purdue.edu>, "What is Usenet?", regular posting to news.announce.newusers].
(20 Apr 1996)