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USENET is an informal network of tens of thousands of computers worldwide. Many sites are running UNIX, since the original goal of USENET was to tie together the UNIX community for advice and mutual support.
USENET is like an electronic bulletin board service. It allows users at participating sites to post electronic news articles around the network, and to read news items from other users at other sites. Each site gets copies of all news items.
News items are posted to a specific newsgroup. This restricts discussion of a given topic to people who are interested in it. There are newsgroups to discuss bicycles, books, the C programming language, database management, ham radio, and thousands of other topics. You can post news items for distribution to sites around the world, or just to your local community.
Since there may be over 1 million articles active at any given time, they are arranged based on the topic to which they relate. Usenet topics are arranged in a hierarchical manner (general topics are broken into more specific interests), such that, for example, articles relating to the 386bsd operating system will be under the `386bsd' group, under the `os' subhierarchy, under the `comp' hierarchy. This group is represented by the dotted notation `comp.os.386bsd' (pronounced: "comp oh-es three-atee-six bee-es-dee". Many may also include "dot" between the divisions). Articles under this group all pertain to that topic. This allows the user to interact with only subjects in his/her particular interests.
There are several different user interfaces for USENET news:
rn (or rrn), nn, gnus (within emacs),
tin. Three obsolete newsreaders, which you may hear references to
are readnews, vnews, and notes.
Most of these use the NNTP protocol to read news from a remote server which stores all articles. Other machines can then run the client program and it will retrieve the articles from the news server.
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