Re: Usenet Posting

[et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Black)]

"julian814" (julian814@hotmail.com) writes:
> I just noticed something today - back when I first had my Franklin ACE
> 500 online, it would take at *least 24 hours for a usenet post to get a
> reply. Now I get replies in a matter of minutes. I guess progress isn't
> so bad, after all. ;-)
> 
> 
That's because Usenet isn't the internet.

It dates from 1979 or 80, and was done over phone lines.  You connect
to the next system over, exchange messages, and hang up.  The next system
does it with their next system, and so on.  Done that way, the messages do
take time to propagate, especially given that the phone calls were not
constant.

It's the same basic concept as Fidonet, which networked the BBSs by using low
phone rates in the middle of the night (which also was when few would be
calling in to use the BBSs).

The concept, of using phone lines to network, was covered in a 3 part
series in Byte in 1978, and one of the articles was in the same issue as
the article about the first BBS.  I have no idea how this influenced
Usenet or Fidonet, but it was there pretty early.

It was only later that Usenet used the internet to pass messages.  That 
caused fairly instantaneous replies, since the messages propagated
so much faster, and the batching was gone, so messages flowed out
at a near continous basis.

Of course, the tradeoff was that it moved away from being a co-operative
system, I'll hold your and transfer your messages if you do the same for
me, to a more commercial enterprise, where third parties took care of the
news and the ISPs paid them for it.  That move away from the origins is
bound to be the cause of some/many ISPs no longer carrying the newsgroups.

  Michael