Usenet News

To understand what the Usenet is, imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days, as if people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. Unlike email, which is one-to-one, Usenet is many-to-many. Usenet is the international meeting place where people gather to meet their research colleagues and friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk about whatever is on their mind. Jumping into a Usenet discussion can be a liberating experience. Nobody knows what you look or sound like, how old you are, what your background is. You're judged solely on your words, your ability to make a point.

The discussions on Usenet are organised into topics, ranging form scientific issues like comp.compression.research or sci.med.pharmacy to a vast number of recreational areas like alt.bonsai, uk.rec.climbing or even rec.food.cooking. Here at the ETH you can see more than 10'000 Usenet news groups.

Usenet for Real

For reading Usenet news we recommend one of the programs mozilla, thunderbird, slrn which are available on your Tardis account.

When you configure a news reader you must know the name of your news server. Within the ETH this server is called news.ethz.ch