Usenet

Usenet has been defined as:


 * a worldwide community of electronic BBSs that is closely associated with the Internet and with the Internet community. The messages in Usenet are organized into thousands of topical groups, or “Newsgroups”. . . . As a Usenet user, you read and contribute (“post”) to your local Usenet site. Each Usenet site distributes its users’ postings to other Usenet sites based on various implicit and explicit configuration settings, and in turn receives postings from other sites. . . . Usenet is read and contributed to on a daily basis by a total population of millions of people. . . . There is no specific network that is the Usenet. Usenet traffic flows over a wide range of networks, including the Internet and dial-up phone links.