What is Usenet?

Usenet is a distributed discussion system older than the web: tens of thousands of topic-named "newsgroups" (soc.culture.yugoslavia, comp.text.tex) replicated between servers worldwide since 1980. No company owns it; servers exchange articles with their peers, and anyone with access to one server can read and post to groups carried everywhere.

Through the 1980s and 1990s it was the internet’s public square — where FAQs were invented, where flame wars were perfected, where much of early online culture formed. The web, forums and social platforms gradually absorbed its functions, and its text groups are quiet now, but the system still runs and its archives constitute one of the great primary sources of internet history.

Group names are hierarchical: soc.* for society, comp.* for computing, rec.* for recreation, sci.* for science, and the anything-goes alt.*. This directory describes the groups the old gateway carried — browse them from the front page.