Though we do not have any groups installed just yet, when they are -- they will be courtasy of Nick Andre who is the Official Xpresit Net Usenet Feed for anyone in Xpresit who wants or needs them. Though Nick offers the entire Usenet Backbone (with the exception of the binary groups), we will only be carrying the alt.bbs.* groups and maybe a few select other ones. Maybe.

For those of you who might not nessesarily know what Usenet Newsgroups are, we think Wikipedia explains it best...

Usenet, a portmanteau of "user" and "network", is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system. It evolved from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.

It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post public messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various web forums which are widely used today; and can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between Email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, with modern news reader software, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

One notable difference from a BBS or web forum is that there is no central server, nor central system owner. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers which store and forward messages to one another. These servers are loosely connected in a variable mesh.[clarify] Individual users usually read from and post messages to a local server operated by their ISP, university or employer. The servers then exchange the messages between one another, so that they are available to readers beyond the original server. [ read more ]

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