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Also known as: Usenet News
A distributed discussion system launched in 1980, a decade before the web. Articles are posted into named newsgroups and copied from server to server rather than held in one central place, so no single operator controls the network or can take all of it down. Reading requires an account on a news server and client software. Text discussion dominated early; binary file distribution now accounts for nearly all traffic.
Browse all terms in Core Usenet Concepts, or see the full Usenet glossary.