Google has released a 20 year timeline of usenet newsgroup history, highlighting notable events along the way.

I find it very interesting to see the history of the “world's largest BBS“.

Personally I got involved in usenet in 1989 or 1990. I was working for a bio-medical manufacturing company, and managed to convince a local defense contractor to allow us to tap a usenet feed off them. The feed came through our 1200 baud modem, with us dialing into their system to transfer the data. Later they also allowed us to route email through their system over our much faster 2400 baud modems. Ahh, those were the days!

Why'd they do this you ask? Because we were both DEC VAX shops, and there was a hacker-metality brotherhood amongst VAX admins. (that's hacker in the good sense, not the dark sense) I don't think much of that mentality still exists in our industry, and that is a sad loss. I suppose it is the price of “progress“.

Prior to getting the usenet feed, I was a Citadel user. That was a Commodore 64 BBS that worked in a manner similar to usenet. It might have run on the Amiga too, but I don't recall for certain. Anyway, Citadel was a store-and-forward relay system like usenet (at the time), and so I was able to interact with people from all across North America via a local phone call. Someone in the area obviously made long-distance calls as a gateway, and my thanks go to that unknown benefactor!

To bring it back to the usenet timeline though, I think this timeline is interesting by itself. But it also should help us remember that the Web is just one thread in the much richer tapestry that is the Internet proper.