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and the transport mechanisms now used to support it include not only the
original UUCP links, but also X.25, ACSNET, and others.
USENET combines the idea of mailing lists as long used on the ARPANET with
bulletin-board service such as has existed for many years on TOPS-20 and other
systems, adding a freedom of subject matter that could never exist on the
ARPANET, and reaching a more varied constituency. While chaotic and inane
ramblings abound, the network is quite popular.
The USENET news network is a distributed computer conferencing system
bearing some similarities to commercial conferencing systems like CompuServe,
though USENET is much more distributed. Users pursue both technical and
social ends on USENET. Exchanges are submitted to newsgroups on various
topics, ranging from gardening to astronomy.
The name "USENET" comes from the USENIX Association. The Professional and
Technical UNIX User's Group. The name UNIX is a pun on Multics, which is the
name of a major predecessor operating system. (The pun indicates that, in
areas where Multics tries to do many things, UNIX tries to do one thing well.)
USENET has no central administration, though there are newsgroups to which
introductory and other information about the network is posted monthly.
USENET is currently defined as the set of hosts receiving the newsgroup
news.announce. There are about a dozen hosts that constitute the backbone of
the network, keeping transit times low by doing frequent transfers among
themselves and with other hosts that they feed. Since these hosts bear much
of the burden of the network, their administrators tend to take a strong
interest in the state of the network. Most newsgroups can be posted to by
anyone on the network. For others, it is necessary to mail a submission to a
moderator, who decides whether to post it. Most moderators just filter out
redundant articles, though some make decisions on other grounds. These
newsgroup moderators form another group interested in the state of the
network. Newsgroups are created or deleted according to the decisions made
after the discussion in the newsgroup "news.groups".
Each host pays its own telephone bills. The backbone hosts have higher
bills than most other hosts due to their long-distance links among themselves.
The unit of communication is the news article. Each article is sent by a
flooding routing algorithm to all nodes on the network. The transport layer
is UUCP for most links, although many others are used, including ethernets,
berknets, and long-haul packet-switched networks; sometimes UUCP is run on top
of the others, and sometimes UUCP is not used at all.
The many problems with USENET (e.g. reader overload, old software, slow
propagation speed, and high and unevenly carried costs of transmission) have
raised the possibility of using the experience gained in USENET to design a
new network to replace it. The new network might also involve at least a
partial replacement for the UUCP mail network.
One unusual mechanism that has been proposed to support the new network is
stargate. Commercial television broadcasting techniques leave unused
bandwidth in the vertical blanking interval between picture frames. Some
broadcasters are currently using this part of the signal to transmit Teletext
services. Since many cable-television channels are distributed via
geo-synchronous satellites, a single input to a satellite uplink facility can
reach all of North America on an appropriate satellite and channel. A
satellite uplink company interested in allowing USENET-like articles to be
broadcast by satellite on a well-known cable-television channel has been
found. Prototypes of hardware and software to encode the articles and other
hardware to decode them from a cable-television signal have been built and
tested in the field for more than a year. A new, reasonably price model of
the decoding box may be available soon.
This facility would allow most compatible systems within the footprint
(area of coverage) of the satellite and with access to the appropriate cable-
television channel to obtain decoding equipment and hook into the network at a
very reasonable cost. Articles would be submitted for transmission by UUCP
links to the satellite uplink facility. Most of the technical problems of
Stargate seem to have been solved.
More than 90 percent of all USENET articles reach 90 percent of all hosts
on the network within three days. Though there have been some famous bugs
that caused loss of articles, that particular problem has become rare.
Every USENET host has a name. That host name and the name of the poster
are used to identify the source of an article. Though those hosts that are on
both the UUCP mail and USENET news networks usually have the same name on both
networks, mail addresses have no meaning on USENET: Mail related to USENET
articles is usually sent via UUCP mail; it cannot be sent over USENET, by
definition. Though the two networks have always been closely related, there
are many more hosts on UUCP than on USENET. In Australia the two networks do
not even intersect except at one host.
There are different distributions of newsgroups on USENET. Some go
everywhere, whereas others are limited to a particular continent, nation,
state or province, city, organization, or even machine, though the more local
distributions are not really part of USENET proper. The European network
EUnet carries some USENET newsgroups and has another set of it's own. JUNET
in Japan is similar to EUnet in this regard.
There are about 2000 USENET hosts in the United States, Canada, Australia,
and probably in other countries. The hosts on EUnet, SDN, and JUNET
communicate with USENET hosts: The total number of news hosts including ones
on those three networks is probably at least 2500. The UUCP map includes
USENET map information as annotations. A list of legitimate netwide
newsgroups is posted to several newsgroups monthly. Volunteers keep
statistics on the use of the various newsgroups (all 250 of them) and on
frequency of posting by persons and hosts. These are posted to news.newslists
once a month, as is the list of newsgroups. Important announcements are
posted to moderated newsgroups, news.announce and news.announce.newusers,
which are intended to reach all users (the current moderator is Mark Horton,
cbosgd!mark). An address for information on the network is
seismo!usenet-request.
News on UUNET - June 1988
-------------------------
A year ago, UUNET (Fairfax, VA) was formed to help ease the communication
load of the beleaguered Usenet network of UNIX users. Usenet connections
were becoming increasingly costly and difficult to maintain, a situation that