- distributed bboard (bulletin board) system supported mainly by Unix
machines
- originally implemented in 1979-1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom
Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University
- largest decentralized information utility in existence
- by 1994 original UUCP transport for Usenet faded out of use
- lot of newbies and journalists refer to "Internet newsgroups" as though
Usenet was and always had been just another Internet service. This ignorance
greatly annoys experienced Usenetters.
UUCPNET
The store-and-forward network consisting of all the world's connected Unix
machines (and others running some clone of the UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy)
software). Any machine reachable only via a bang path is on UUCPNET. This
term has been rendered obsolescent by the spread of cheap Internet
connections in the 1990s; the few remaining UUCP links are essentially slow
channels to the Internet rather than an autonomous network.
