Newsgroups
At the time of the birth of CSnet in 1979, researchers at the University of North Carolina began to develop an interactive, electronic newspaper to pass messages to other researchers at Duke University, now known as Usenet. Making up the Usenet are hierarchies known as Newsgroups. The idea was that any network user could post articles onto a specific newgroup and respond to other's postings. There were two original newsgroups: mod and net. Mod was developed to discuss computer software products and net was developed to discuss issues related to the Internet.
In 1986, new newsgroups were created and subcategories were developed as a continuation of the hierarchical organization of Usenet. Today, there are over 10,000 different discussion groups.
