UseNet: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
Before there were [[Message Board
Usenet began in 1979, when programmers at Duke University realised that [[UNIX]]'s ''uucp'' program, which was already being used to transfer email between sites, could also be used to transfer broadcast messages between sites (the original idea was to enable "community calendar"-style announcements, hence "news") and allow for discussion areas, which they decided to call "newsgroups". Eventually, as access to the Internet became more common, ''uucp'' was replaced by the Network News Transfer Protocol, and in 1985, the system itself was reorganised into 7 branches (the "Big 7") in an event called the "Great Renaming". An 8th, ''humanities'', was added later.
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Outside the Big 8, but no less important:
* ''alt'': Usenet's equivalent to [[Image Boards|4chan]], right down to having 4chan's bad reputation; one old joke expands "alt" to "anarchists, lunatics and terrorists" due to the huge number of [[Single-Issue Wonk|Single Issue Wonks]] and [[Cloudcuckoolander
* Various regions and domains may have their own private or semi-private branches, such as ''vt'' (for Virginia Tech) or ''microsoft.public'' ([[Microsoft]]'s official tech support forums).
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