November 2019
The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue (14 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part II: The Technological Setting (14 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part III: Hardware and Economics (15 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part IV: File Format (17 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part V: Implementation and User Experience (21 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part VI: Authentication and Norms (22 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part VII: The Public Announcement (25 November 2019)
The Early History of Usenet, Part VIII: Usenet Growth and B-news (30 November 2019)

The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue

14 November 2019

November 2019 is, as best I can recall, the 40th anniversary of the conception of Usenet. (What’s Usenet? The Wikipedia article is ok but not perfect.) I should have written a proper paper; instead, there will (probably) be an irregular series of blog posts. I’ll do Part I of N tonight.


Here is the table of contents, actual and projected, for this series.

  1. The Early History of Usenet: Prologue
  2. The Technological Setting
  3. Hardware and Economics
  4. File Format
  5. Implementation and User Experience
  6. Authentication and Norms
  7. The Public Announcement
  8. Usenet Growth and B-news
  9. The Great Renaming
  10. Retrospective Thoughts
  11. Errata

The tag URL https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/control/tag_index.html#TH_Usenet_history will always take you to an index of all blog posts on this topic.

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html