USENET | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica
USENET, in full User’s Network, an Internet-based network of discussion groups. USENET began in 1979 when two graduate students at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with a way to exchange messages and files between computers using UNIX-to-UNIX copy protocol (UUCP). Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, wrote the software that controlled this first version of USENET. USENET officially began in 1980 in North Carolina with three networked computers, located at UNC, Duke, and Duke Medical School. Many improvements were developed over the years,