usenet

[mdl]

anyone have any experience?

[RichP]

Thats the original internet, used to be only 25,000 news groups, now it's over 100,000... I use it regular, when you do a google or dejanews search thats what you are searching in case you didn't know, rec.willys+jeep is a good newsgroup, as is rec.motorcycles, I'm also a DoD member....the original internet motorcycle club...
Then there's the alt.binaries but I wont go into detail on them, suffice to say you need a good ISP who does not limit your newgroup bandwidth, those x rated movies fill it fast...

The easiest newreader is Xnews, runs in its own directory and does not interact with the OS like the others.

[mdl]

So how exactly does it work? You pay some company to give you usenet access? I've been hearing about how much better than regular p2p it is and there is really a lack of information abouts it online. I'm a huge computer nerd too so I suppose it's one of the internets best kept secrets.

[ChiXJeff]

Usenet is a distributed system. Each server maintains a list of newgroups, and posts for those newgroups. Periodically, it'll distribute new posts out to it's neighbors.

Access depends on your ISP and what you've got access to. Sometimes you pays, sometimes you don't. And you might want to buy access to a commercial Usenet farm that carries newsgroups that your ISP doesn't.