4.8  USENET HISTORY  
 

In the late 1970s, Unix developers came up with a new feature: a system 
to allow Unix computers to exchange data over phone lines. 

In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University in North Carolina, Tom 
Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using this system, known 
as UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy), to distribute information of interest to 
people in the Unix community.  Along with Steve Bellovin, a graduate 
student at the University of North Carolina and Steve Daniel, they wrote 
conferencing software and linked together computers at Duke and UNC. 
 
Word quickly spread and by 1981, a graduate student at Berkeley, Mark 
Horton and a nearby high school student, Matt Glickman, had released a 
new version that added more features and was able to handle larger 
volumes of postings -- the original North Carolina program was meant for 
only a few articles in a newsgroup each day. 

Today, this system, now called Usenet, connects tens of thousands of 
sites around the world, from mainframes to Amigas.  With more than 3,000 
newsgroups and untold thousands of readers, it is perhaps the world's 
largest computer network.