"mathew davis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It's funny that you mention that I am only 24 so I guess I would fit in the > youngster category. I don't even know what usenet is.
Usenet was (well, is, but it has been dying for a long time) a global system in which RFC-822 style messages (same format as email) were presented to the user in semi-hierarchically structured "newsgroups". The term "news" was the idiosyncratic name given to said messages. The messages were distributed by a "flood fill" mechanism among participating hosts, initially via uucp in the era of dialup and then later over TCP via the NNTP protocol. Large numbers of "news readers" were developed, with interesting user interfaces. Usenet had excellent the feature that it allowed people around the world to participate in discussions of technical topics without having to know a priori that the topics existed (since the news reader allowed you to browse all groups) and without having to specifically "subscribe then wait" (since you could see messages that had been posted before you actually "joined"). The bad part was that the flood fill mechanism means every site in the network has to carry *all* traffic even if no one locally is reading a particular topic. Ultimately this architectural issue and the failure to address it is what killed Usenet -- a decentralized architecture would have preserved it. Today, RSS readers somewhat simulate the feel of "newsgroups", but with serious technical downsides (including polling, and needing to fetch everything and not just updates every time you do an RSS poll) and without the interactivity or standardized message format. "Someday" I'd love to create a next generation Usenet that fixed all this -- I would distribute only "newsgroup announcements" rather than the newsgroups themselves, make the topic namespace subdivided by domain names to eliminate the "global namepsace" problem, and use a bit-torrent like "centrally tracked but peer to peer distributed" transfer method to eliminate the need for giant news spools. However, realistically, I'll never have the month to do the work. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community