I always thought usenet was a scam. everytime I look for a download on torrents and shit they recommend usenet. What is it? A P2P Like limewire?
Lol
usenet is one of the oldest networks and technolgy on the internet. Even older then www. Usenet started in the 70's and www in the 90's.
Usenet was actually a prelude to wat forums are today: newsgroups. You could (and still can) post threads and reply to messages in different categories.
You have to realise that back then there was no www and everything on the internet was done in terminal screens like telnet.
So you would dial in to ur isp and get a command prompt. No fancy graphics, just something like a dos box.
Since bandwith over the internet was limited and expensive the isp preffered u to stay on their local network thus every isp had its own usenet server and all these servers would be linked together creating a worldwide network. The internet back then was really an interlinking of networks. Irc also comes out of this period.
Nowadays usenet gets used primairely for binairy transfers, thus big files. Lots of pirated content.
Since all these servers are interlinked it does not really matter what server u use since they all have the same content.
More important is the retention aka how long something stays on disk at the big isps.
Nowadays thr bigger servers are around thousand days, which means that u can download something from 3 years back.
Since there is no p2p u get very high speeds (i dl at 10mb/s from newshosting). Also the law in my country says that u cannot share pirated content, but they say nothing about downloading. So torrents are illigal since u also upload but usenet is not...
If u want to see what the internet looked like before www take a look at the transcripts on takedown.com
