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An Introduction to USENET
Newsgroups (also known as USENET) are one of the oldest parts of the Internet, predating the World Wide Web by over a decade. Originally designed as tool to allow researchers to easily communicate with each other, USENET has grown to contain over 30,000 discussion groups, covering almost every topic imaginable. Whatever your interest, there's bound to be a newsgroup devoted to it. USENET works a lot like a community bulletin board. You begin by "subscribing" to the groups that interest you. This allows you to read and/or post messages to those groups. Messages posted by you (or anyone else) will become visible to anyone else reading that newsgroup. Any replies will also be posted for the group to see. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to as many newsgroups as you want as often as you like.
USENET is divided into hierarchies, moving from the general to the
specific. The best known top-level hierarchies are:
comp: computers and computing One other very popular top-level category is the alt hierarchy, where groups are created that don't easily fit into any other category. USENET group names indicate the category they belong to. For instance, one of the groups devoted to the discussion of 35mm cameras is named rec.photo.equipment.35mm. The "rec" in the group name indicates which top-level domain it's under. "photo" is a subcategory under "rec", and "equipment" and "35mm" are further subcategories. Once you've worked your way down to the "rec.photo" subcategory, you can begin to find other related groups, such as rec.photo.equipment.aps and rec.photo.digital. With over 30,000 newsgroups, however, it can sometimes be tricky to find the ones you're looking for. Almost every newsreader program has a search feature, however, that will let you put in a keyword (such as "35mm") to find groups whose names contain that keyword. Please be aware that, since any USENET participant can post almost anything they want, you may run across messages with offensive, deceptive, or illegal content. Please be careful and discerning as you explore the newsgroups available to you.
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