In 1979, two Duke University students decided to replace the outdated Bulletin Board System used by the university for local announcements. The two students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, with the help of Steve Bellovin, created the first Usenet package, called “netnews”, which took advantage of existing communications software on Unix systems called UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy). The servers, also called nodes, used a connection between the computing departments at Duke University and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

In 1980, the netnews software was renamed “A News” and released to the public. Other universities and research facilities began setting up their own Usenet nodes. As the number of nodes continued to grow, it wasn’t long before the amount of traffic exceeded the handling capabilities of the original scripts. “A News” was succeeded by “B news”, developed by Mark Horton, a Cal-Berkeley student, and Matt Glickman, a high school student. In addition to using UUCP, “B news” also took advantage of the DARPA connection at cal-berkeley to provide a link to the ARPANET, a US government network similar in some ways to the modern Internet, connecting government agencies, major research facilities, and universities.

In 1986, the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) was developed to replace UUCP, and a package called NNTPd was written to work with existing “B News” article repositories. Unlike UUCP, where each node sends articles to other nodes based on the article path, which could result in receiving duplicates, NNTP allowed nodes to query each other and only send articles that were missing from the other server. This greatly decreased the amount of article traffic, and the “always on” aspect of the Internet also reduced the time it took to distribute articles to all nodes. NNTPd also allowed newsreaders to run on client machines instead of requiring them to run on a node. Newsreader clients could connect to a server over the Internet or use a company’s ethernet network. This made it possible for users to only download articles of interest to their PC, instead of having to have a full feed to get all the articles in the groups they wanted to read, or an account on a node to be able to read newsgroups.

In 1987, “C News” was launched by Henry Spencer and Geoff Colyer of the University of Toronto, and over the next few years it slowly took over the Usenet operation of “B News.” Unlike the ending of “A News”, “C News” was mostly compatible with “B News”, and thus sites could convert to the new software at their own pace. In 1989, when the development of “B News” stopped, most of the sites had already been converted to “C News”. “C News” was still heavily tied to its Unix origins and was originally written using the Unix shell and awk to perform most operations. Successive releases of “C News” replaced most existing scripts with C Code to further improve performance. The modular design made replacing separate parts of the system with C Code a fairly simple matter. “C News” still used UUCP and modems to transfer articles between nodes, but NNTPd could be used to transfer articles over the Internet to newsreader clients and other Internet-connected nodes.

Also in 1987, a group of administrators, calling themselves the “Backbone Cabal,” took it upon themselves to reorganize newsgroups into logical hierarchies, which are the origin of the hierarchies we see today. The Cabal created the original 7 hierarchies, called the “Big Seven”, comp.*, news.*, misc.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.* and talk.*. After some time and much campaigning, the Cabal also agreed to create the alt.* hierarchy, which was not managed by them, establishing what is known today as the “Big 8”. The alt.* hierarchy, which allows anyone with a little technical knowledge to create a newsgroup, is now the most popular and active hierarchy left on Usenet.

In 1991, “C News” was superseded by a package called InterNetNews (INN) written by Rich Salz of the Internet Systems Consortium. INN fully implements NNTP as a first-class service in news software, but it can still work with older UUCP transfers, although this functionality is rarely used anymore. The implementation of NNTP in the software, along with other design improvements over “C News”, greatly improves the overall performance of the news software. Most modern commercial Usenet providers use INN or custom INN-based software.