Usenet, an early groupware tool.

Last week I wrote about Nethack, an early collaborative software project undertaken by voluntary coders around the world. The project had (and has) an amazing longevity thanks to it's collaborative nature, remaining long since some the original creators have moved on or even passed away. Before that I touched on the coarse practice (or 'fine art', depending on who you ask) of Trolling, the act of baiting users into losing their cool in internet-based conversations. While seemingly completely unrelated, the concept of Trolling and the groupware nature of Nethack share a common aspect: their origin.

This week I'll look into the primary tool used in the Nethack project, as well as the source of the concept of "Trolling for Newbies"; Usenet, a worldwide internet discussion system that can be considered an early workgroup support system. While this may not be the original intention of the project, the Nethack example clearly shows it was successfully utilized as such.

History: Usenet was conceived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University in 1979 and publicly established in the following year. A decade before the world wide web even came to exist, Usenet facilitated group conversations in a manner that resembled standard email but was delivered into servers instead of individual recipients. The articles would be organized into 'newsgroups' which themselves contained their articles organized in hierarchical manner. Far from real-time conversations modern users have come to expect, Usenet's articles would be relayed in batches, from server to server, sometimes only once or twice a day. While largely overtaken by modern forums, blogs and mailing lists, usenet still remains in use to this day.

Layout of the system: As I mentioned before, the articles in Usenet functioned somewhat like emails directed at servers instead of individual users. The user would post his/her post on the original server used, which would then (sooner or later... usually) push it's posts forward to other servers, which would then do the same at their own time. The articles themselves would remain on the servers, organized in a hierarchical logic; for example, a newsgroup still in use containing Nethack-related information and stories is organized as rec.games.roguelike.nethack - meaning the articles are contained in the category of 'nethack', which belongs to the category of 'roguelikes' that itself is contained in the rather large cathegory of 'games'. The final category of 'rec' refers to very generic and large Usenet category that stands for 'recreational, making the logic in this organization very obvious.

Source and references:
A Piece of Internet History
Internet and Usenet Explained
Nethack, collaboratively developed project with vintage
Trolling!