Newsgroups

A news group is a internet-based discussion about a particular topic. These topics range from anything ! Even though the word 'news' is in 'newsgroups', they are rarely about current events. Newsgroups cover anything from cars, inventions, lifestyles, and plenty of other topics and things to discuss! Newsgroups can be highly useful for information or even community dialogue. People of all ages take advantage of this, and the services offered by these communities.

Newsgroups officially started appearing in the 1970's which pre-dates the internet. Students at colleges and universities wanted to communicate, but simply did not have the facilities to do so, so they developed unset ( user network) a network of servers and individual computer. People communicated on unset by posting into newsgroups or reading the content on there, which was of interest to them in that particular newsgroup.

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In order to actually access a newsgroup, someone needs to obtain a programme called newsreader, which communicates with unset. Some browsers already have newsreaders already built in and many others have operating systems which also come with a default newsreader.

To get into a news group, users post a messages into a news server which then puts them into a bunch of other participating servers. Once this is done, then other users can access the newsgroup and read postings. The groups can be ''Moderated'' or controlled which is where a person or group decides which postings will become part of the discussion, or ''unmoderated'', where everything is posted and is included in the discussion at will.

To participate in newsgroups, you must subscribe to it. Newsgroups are generally free, but with some groups it can be difficult to get in unless you know someone in the group. Nearly all newsgroups are found on ''Unenet'', which is a collection of servers from all around the world. With newsgroups being global, they make up the largest bulletin board system (BBS) in the world.

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The number of newsgroups in the world are far to many to be going and scrolling through. It helps to have friends recommends different newsgroups for you, to help navigate the system.

Also many newsgroups have enormous archives which are stored on the server which stretch back to decades ago. This can be highly resourceful and contain lots of interesting material.

Some archives have been extracted and converted into HTML format so that it can be read in the regular web browsers. Pursuing these archived newsgroups show how ideas have evolved and changed over the course of time and newsgroup existence...