Netnews: The Origin Story

Netnews, sometimes called Usenet, was arguably the first social network. Quarterman describes it as “one of the oldest cooperative networks.” It had a profound influence on online socializing, including helping to give to the world the current slang meanings of words such as “spam,” “troll,” and “flame.” It was where many technologies we now take for granted were first announced, including Linux, the World Wide Web, and the graphical web browser. But its design was a function of both its design goals and the technological context of the time. I describe those and a variety of other early design decisions, those which were right, those which were wrong, and those which were inevitable.