"Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read." - Ken Iverson
Usenet is a distributed internet discussion system in which users can read and post public messages in "newsgroups". The user connects toa single server which allows access to the system of newsgroups and takes care of the distribution of the messages. Contrary to web forums Usenet discussions are not unique content on a given server but distributed between different servers.
Unfortunately with the growing popularity of web forums times for the Usenet became harder. But still, Usenet is a great technology to have a public discussion among people all around the world. Some newsgroups are still very much alive, while other topics have moved on to the world wide web in the meantime.
One of the reasons I still mention the Usenet is, that it has been over 10 years ago the place of my first social contacts made online. The other one is that for a time I used to provide official binaries of the slrn newsreader to the public. Of course only for weird and obscure hardware platforms. Links to the binariy files are below.
To get started three things are required:
During the "good old days" the internet providers also used to provide Usenet access, these times are more or less over. So there is the need to look for a dedicated Usenet provider. These run the servers that are the backbone of the network. The choice of a provider heavily dependant your location, the links in the further reading section include additional hints.
The programs required to access Usenet newsgroups are called newsreader. For almost any hard-/software platform these programs are available. The classic newsreaders are console based applications that are not graphics capable. My personal choice is the slrn newsreader which is available for a wide range of platforms. In the following list I will try to collect some of the most popular newsreaders available:
These links include further introduction into the concept of the Usenet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
http://www.how-to-usenet.com/
The following versions are available in the local archive on on this server (please link to this page).
| AIX 4.2 | slrn version 0.9.8.0 |
|---|---|
| HP-UX 10.20 | slrn version 0.9.8.0 |
| IRIX 4.0.1 | slrn version 0.9.8.0 |
| IRIX 5.3 | slrn version 0.9.8.1 |
| IRIX 6.2 | slrn version 0.9.8.1 |
| NetBSD/vax | slrn version 0.9.8.0 |
| Solaris 2.6 | slrn version 0.9.8.1 |
The software packages are intended to be installed into /usr/local using gzip and tar to extract. The slang package located in the same directory as the slrn package should also be installed in the same manner.