Usenet

ARPANET was connecting elite research universities, but most universities couldn't afford to join. In 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis at Duke University and Steve Bellovin at the University of North Carolina had a different idea: what if they used ordinary phone lines and the existing Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP) to create a poor man's internet? Their system, initially connecting just two universities, would become Usenet—the first large-scale experiment in many-to-many public communication online.

The architecture was elegant in its simplicity. Users wrote messages ('articles') to topical 'newsgroups' organized in hierarchies (comp.* for computing, rec.* for recreation, sci.* for science). Articles were stored locally but propagated between sites through nightly phone calls—each server calling its neighbors to exchange new posts, which would ripple outward across the network. No central server existed; every participating site held copies of newsgroups they chose to carry.

The adjacent possible was precisely configured for this emergence. Unix systems were proliferating in universities. UUCP was already handling email between sites. The concept of bulletin board systems existed. What Usenet added was scale and decentralization: thousands of discussions happening simultaneously across hundreds of sites, with no authority controlling what could be discussed.

Usenet grew explosively. By 1984, it had 1,300 sites and was generating 50 articles per day; by 1987, 5,000 sites and 1,000 articles daily. The Great Renaming of 1986-87 reorganized the chaotic namespace into the hierarchical structure still used today. The 'alt.*' hierarchy emerged for topics too controversial for the moderated main hierarchies, spawning everything from alt.fan.* celebrity groups to alt.music.* to communities that tested the limits of free expression.

Usenet pioneered concepts that would define online culture: FAQs (to prevent repetitive questions), flame wars, trolling, kill files (personal filters), moderation policies, and the challenges of scaling communities. It was where Linus Torvalds announced Linux in 1991 and where early internet culture incubated before the web existed. Though eclipsed by web forums, Reddit, and social media, Usenet's architecture—decentralized, persistent, propagated—proved that large-scale many-to-many communication was possible. The norms and problems it discovered remain relevant: how do communities self-govern? How do newcomers learn culture? How do you prevent bad actors from drowning out good? Usenet was humanity's first laboratory for these questions.