What is Usenet ?

There is no “central” Usenet server. Rather there are thousands of servers chained and cross linked together in order to exchange articles between them, and to keep the articles available for their own users to read for a period of time ranging from hours to weeks.

It is a collection of user-submitted notes or messages on various subjects that are posted to servers on a worldwide network. Each subject collection of posted notes is known as a newsgroups. There are thousands of newsgroups and it is possible for you to form a new one. Most groups are hosted on Internet-connected servers, but they can also be hosted from servers that are not part of the Internet. The original protocol was UNIX-to-UNIX Copy (UUCP), but today the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is used.

Usenet is mostly accessed via newsgroup readers, such as Outlook Express, that run as separate programs.