Netnews is a distributed bulletin board system that was deployed in the early 1980s. Netnews had an important influence on the Internet and served as a precursor of today’s social networks. Netnews was the platform of choice for major technical announcements. Linus Torvalds announced Linux on netnews, Marc Andreessen announced the first release of the Mosaic browser, …

Steve Bellovin, one of the lead designers of the first version of Netnews recalls in Netnews: The Origin Story the early design choices of Netnews and places them in the historical context with the types of networks and computers that were available at that time. A nice read if you want to understand a system that influenced many other designs later.

You can follow this blog by subscribing to its RSS feed or by following @cnp3_ebook on mastodon.