or you can go back to the Index .
"Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory."
-- Emily Post, Etiquette
Imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days, as if people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. Or imagine the electronic equivalent of a radio talk show where everybody can put their two cents in and no one is ever on hold.
Unlike e-mail, which is usually "one-to-one," Usenet is "many-to- many." Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet their friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk about whatever's on their mind. Jumping into a Usenet discussion can be a liberating experience. Nobody knows what you look or sound like, how old you are, what your background is. You're judged solely on your words, your ability to make a point.
To many people, Usenet IS the Net. In fact, it is often confused with Internet. But it is a totally separate system. All Internet sites CAN carry Usenet, but so do many non-Internet sites, from sophisticated Unix machines to old XT clones and Apple IIs.
Technically, Usenet messages are shipped around the world, from host system to host system, using one of several specific Net protocols. Your host system stores all of its Usenet messages in one place, which everybody with an account on the system can access. That way, no matter how many people actually read a given message, each host system has to store only one copy of it. Many host systems "talk" with several others regularly in case one or another of their links goes down for some reason. When two host systems connect, they basically compare notes on which Usenet messages they already have. Any that one is missing the other then transmits, and vice-versa. Because they are computers, they don't mind running through thousands, even millions, of these comparisons every day.
Yes, millions. For Usenet is huge. Every day, Usenet users pump upwards of 40 million characters a day into the system -- roughly the equivalent of volumes A-G of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Obviously, nobody could possibly keep up with this immense flow of messages. Let's look at how to find conferences and discussions of interest to you.
The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called conferences, forums, bboards or special-interest groups). There are now more than 5,000 of these newsgroups, in several different languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from science fiction to South Africa.
Some public-access systems, typically the ones that work through menus, try to make it easier by dividing Usenet into several broad categories. Choose one of those and you're given a list of newsgroups in that category. Then select the newsgroup you're interested in and start reading.
Other systems let you compile your own "reading list" so that you only see messages in conferences you want. In both cases, conferences are arranged in a particular hierarchy devised in the early 1980s. Newsgroup names start with one of a series of broad topic names. For example, newsgroups beginning with "comp." are about particular computer-related topics. These broad topics are followed by a series of more focused topics (so that "comp.unix" groups are limited to discussion about Unix). The main hierarchies are:
... With so much to choose from, everybody will likely have their own unique Usenet reading list. But there are a few newsgroups that are particularly of interest to newcomers. Among them:
The EFF (1) notes that daily input into Usenet is equivalent to volumes A-G of the Encyclopedia Britannica. You should be warned that the information on Usenet is of much lower quality. Anybody with an opinion can post anything in a Usenet newsgroup, whether they know what they're talking about or not. If you want to bet your grade in school or your company's or organization's future on information you get from Usenet, please e-mail me first -- I have some bargains in real estate (including a great price for a bridge in Brooklyn) I'd like to discuss with you.
There are more Usenet newsgroups, dedicated to the discussion of more topics, than you could even imagine. I recently heard that there are over 6,000 different Usenet newsgroups, although I think that number may be a little low. The Osborne/McGraw-Hill Internet Yellow Pages has fifty-five pages of Usenet newsgroup listings (p. 363-418).
What are some of these newsgroups? Here is a short list taken from the Osborne/McGraw-Hill Internet Yellow Pages (and reprinted by permission):
GROUP TYPE
gnu.emacs.sources Usenet newsgroup
RHA-L Mailing list
rec.birds Usenet newsgroup
Navigate Mailing list
So, how do you read the posts in a Usenet newsgroup? Well, you have to
have access to a Usenet newsreader. There are literally DOZENS of different Usenet readers out there. Your local Internet provider will be able to tell you what Usenet reader you have access to, and will probably also be able to tell you some of your reader's commands (remember that in a lot of Usenet readers the commands are case sensitive).
Some of the more important Usenet reader commands that you need to know are:
- How to access your Usenet reader
- How to access a particular newsgroup
- How to subscribe/unsubscribe to a particular newsgroup
- How to read a post
- How to send a post
- How to respond to a posting by e-mail
- How to save a post
- How to move from one newsgroup to another
- How to exit your Usenet reader
If you don't have Usenet access, or if your provider does not have a help file, please be patient. When we get to the lessons on Gopher (in about 2 weeks), I'll show you some tricks that will help you around this problem :)
nn users: rn users:
filename filetype filename filetype
nn intro rn intro
nn cmds rn cmds
(1) We'll talk about the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Wednesday.
The text in this lesson comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "EFF's Guide to the Internet, v.2.3" and is reprinted by permission.
To go to the next lesson, click on the arrow
or you can go back to the Index .
To unsubscribe from any Roadmap workshop, please send an e-mail letter to LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU which says UNSUB * in the body of your letter.
The address that sent this e-mail letter (CRISPEN@UA1VM.UA.EDU) is actually the address of an automated error processor. Please DO NOT reply to this e-mail letter as the error processor will consider your reply to be an error message and will delete your letter unread. To contact Patrick Crispen, please use my PCRISPE1@UA1VM.UA.EDU address.
(\__/) .~ ~. ))
/O O `./ .' PATRICK DOUGLAS CRISPEN
{O__, \ { PCRISPE1@UA1VM.UA.EDU
/ . . ) \ THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA
|-| '-' \ } ))
.( _( )_.'
'---.~_ _ _& Warning: squirrels.