A Brief history of Usenet was End of AFW

Jose

NNTP is the protocol. "Usenet" is a historical vestige. 25 years ago, protocol) to connect computers in a store-and-foreward network (today's Internet is a packet-switched network). The original Usenet was subsumed by the Internet gradually during the late '80s-early '90s until only the newsgroups (aka netnews) remain today.

Every NNTP server carries a specified number of groups and each group has a particular retention time (the time an article remains on the server before it expires). Text groups like afw tend to have much longer retention times than binary groups like alt.binaries.

It should be noted, however, that many ISPs are abandoning Usenet service because of a perceived lack of demand. I am lucky in that my ISP hasn't yet made that fateful decision. However, for those whose ISPs have, there are both free and commercial NSPs (News service providers) like Giganews, Supernews, Teranews, Octanews and Usenet-server.com (all commercial). Free servers can be found using

Correction: Google bought Deja.com's Usenet archive. Deja was one of the original commercial Usenet archivers (from '94 or so) and Google augmented its archive by buying various private archives of Usenet going back to '83.

Agreed. Google's interface blows chunks IMHO.

Mark Lipton (posting using Mozilla Thunderbird through Insight's servers)