Make no mistake about it. The concepts behind Usenet newsgroups are as outdated as 75% off Christmas Candy. Despite this crippling fact, the lumbering behemoth somehow continues to drag itself into the light each morning, just to make sure that it's still alive. Each day, the denizens of Usenet (all remaining fourteen, not including automatic spamming programs) log themselves and their sockpuppets on to their news servers to write the messages that the other 13 (and their sockpuppets) will read and condemn. The entire point is to garner the most flames (the denizens of Usenet are a curiously cold-natured group), and to call each other "Nazi" as many times as is humanly possible before logging off and watching daytime talk shows.

In The Beginning...

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as Usenet. People communicated to the masses orally. Occasionally, one or two of them would write a "book", but this was usually only done to give fundamentalists a reason to complain. The world was a very loud place, and eventually someone decided it was time to give his ears a break. Intent on using the latest technology, this enterprising individual decided that computers were the way to go.

First were born the local and national "Electronic Bulletin Board Systems". The proto-geeks (at the time mostly referred to as "trekkies") were able to quickly establish a dominant presence, and thus created a firmly entrenched political (and often physical) control over the BBS landscape. These techno-savvy individuals eventually numbered in double digits, claiming almost the entire population of this electronic world. Once in control, they were able to shape the BBS landscape to their liking. This shape took the form of threaded message boards and downloadable files called "pornographic material". The elected leaders of the BBS community (known as SysOps) were occasionally able to overcome the political bickering among themselves, and connect their boards through message transfer over the primitive telephone network of the time. This was a spotty process at best, and usually only resulted in the users of the individual boards having to read multiple copies of the same message over and over.

The Evolution...

At some point, an up and coming system of interconnected computer networks offered the group a much cheaper alternative to maintaining national links with their sister BBSs. The news service was born. The first news readers were primitive interfaces that listed all the messages in the order that they were received, and the first servers inexplicably deleted the last four lines from randomly selected messages. Eventually, through a savvy treaty among several students at The University, the software began to resemble something usable.

This led to an explosion of new members (at least 20 or so) who were able to decipher the ancient texts and discover the secret servers. As the Internet grew, the local BBSs withered and died. All the functions of the BBS were replaced by various aspects of the Internet. The threaded messages, which by now were the only form of communication available to the geeks (as they were now called), were subsumed by Usenet. Advances in newsreaders and decentralization of the Internet from The University led to more and more people logging on each day, creating a virtual civilization. The geeks had discovered a sort of utopia, where they could interact without exposing themselves to their natural predators (the jocks), and where the most hideous malformations were hidden without effort from both peers and antagonists.

The structure of Usenet was a marvel. The naming convention for the newsgroups (do YOU understand such names as "alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk"?) precluded the adequacy-challenged from discovering the untold wealth of information available. Everything from the complete timeline for the main character in the television series The Highlander to "something about simoN" could be discovered. In addition, Usenet began to develop its own religious community, as net.gods became known far and wide, their posts eclipsing those of mere mortals.

The Decline...

As with all things nifty, however, perfection could not be maintained. Eventually, The Great Evil began to spew its infectious material beyond its own boundaries, and struck out at all the facets of the Internet. With this attack, combined with The Other Great Evil's release of their own newsreader and the sudden discovery of the element Spamium, Usenet was doomed. With the ponderous giant having bloated itself to tens of thousands of newsgroups and hundreds of individuals able to understand the complex naming structure of the groups, it was unable to nimbly adapt to these new threats.

Usenet's successes began to become its undoing as it was mutated by these impurities. The newsgroup messages began to devolve into advertising for pornographic websites (these had replaced the BBS downloads at the same time that Usenet was replacing the threaded messages) and chain letters directing readers to send (US)$1.00 to each of five addresses, in return for which, they would receive $50,000 (and it was completely legal!) Adding to this, the Cabal (There Is No Cabal) of Usenet were losing control to the flamers and insurgents, as something known as Usenet Performance Art began to replace the sparse remaining useful content in the groups. All of this worked together to drive away the last productive members of this once great society.

Today In Usenet News...

And so, the remaining fourteen users log on to their news servers each day, each pretending to be dozens (sometimes hundreds) of individuals, each invading the others' newsgroups, all of them thirsting for the glory they had once attained. After knowing the full history of Usenet, it is a truly sad sight to behold. Already, MSN has shut down their news servers, forcing three of the remaining users to switch ISPs yet again. Only one thing remains to sound the final death knell for this once great empire...an epic script which begs to be displayed to the world in an NBC mini-series.