On Jul 15, 2007, at 0:47 , Jonathan Cast wrote:
Usenet is a giant network of NNTP servers (and UUCP servers before that...) that ISPs (and various Unix sites before that) maintained at one time (most seem to have given up on it now), with thousands of general-purpose newsgroups that at one time were the premier online community.
I'll just point out that NNTP is a *terrible* protocol for news *readers*; it was originally designed to facilitate linking individual news servers. (The various modern NNTP implementations tend to detect readers and switch to a lower overhead NNTP implementation which also restricts some things to keep readers from taking up too much overhead.) Somewhat ironically given the origin of this thread, CMU's solution was to gateway NNTP to IMAP and require readers to use IMAP clients to read the resulting "bboards". -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH