Dr. Dobb's Journal September 1998
It's remarkable how many of the most significant computer technologies were invented by people who felt disenfranchised by some computing elite. The minicomputer and microcomputer revolutions were both inspired by a desire to free computing from an oppressive priesthood. UNIX was invented when AT&T took the Multics OS away from researchers at Bell Labs. And Usenet was first conceived as a "poor man's ARPANET."
ARPANET was the network of computers first launched under the auspices of the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1969 to connect computer scientists and other researchers doing work of interest to the DoD. It would later come to serve as the foundation of today's Internet, but back in 1979, ARPANET was only open to computer-science departments with DoD funding.
Usenet was intended to be open to everyone. It was the brainchild of two Duke University graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. In 1979, with University of North Carolina grad student Steve Bellovin, they formulated the idea for a network connecting UNIX users. Bellovin used the UUCP copy program, the UNIX shell, the UNIX find program, and homemade autodial modems to create a system of shell scripts that would allow computers to call each other up, examine the date stamps of files, and copy new files from computer to computer. Soon they had computers at Duke, UNC, and the Duke Medical School connected and running the system. Another Duke grad student, Steven Daniel, with help from Truscott, recoded the system in C for speed.
Users could submit, read, and comment on articles in specified subject areas, and all machines were updated automatically. The articles focused on UNIX bug fixes and the like, but it didn't take long for the system to expand beyond such computer-science topics.
ARPANET had a similar concept, but was organized around mailing lists, where you got whatever was fed to you, while Usenet let users have more control over what was received. The difference became apparent as some ARPANET sites joined Usenet, and some information seepage between the two nets began.
That difference in philosophy about the distribution of information is still with us, in various forms.
-- M.S.