Tempus fugit - losing a bit of Internet history soon

The Usenet servers at Duke University are being shut down today, May 20th. From Duke Today:

A Piece of Internet History
This week marks the end of an era for one of the earliest pieces of Internet history, which got its start at Duke more than 30 years ago.

On May 20, Duke will shut down its Usenet server, which provides access to a worldwide electronic discussion network of newsgroups started in 1979 by two Duke graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis.

Working with a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, they came up with a simple program to exchange messages and files between computers at Duke and UNC using telephone modems.

The �Users Network,� Usenet for short, grew into an international electronic discussion forum with more than 120,000 newsgroups dedicated to various topics, from local dining to computer programming languages. Each group had a distinctive name such as soc.history or sci.math.

Usenet also played an integral role in the growth of the popularity of the Internet, said Dietolf Ramm, professor emeritus of computer science. At the time, a connection to the Internet was not only expensive but required a research contract with the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency.

�ARPA had funded a few schools to begin the early stages of Internet, but most schools didn�t have that,� said Ramm, who worked with the students who developed Usenet. �Usenet was a pioneering effort because it allowed anybody to connect and participate in communications.�

Many social aspects of online communication � from emoticons and slang acronyms such as LOL to flame wars � originated or were popularized on Usenet.

Although e-mail and other forms of online communication have largely supplanted Usenet, it is still in use, with tens of thousands of discussion groups.

A lot of activity has moved over to Google Groups (Thank you Google!!!) A while ago (talking pre-personal Internet connections) I ran a large multi-line telephone BBS and was able to attach to the Usenet groups -- a lot of fun conversations and rants were had...