On Mon, 01 Dec 2003 17:56:01 +0000, Rob Perkins wrote:

YES. No use being pedantic. The Usenet model comes from the BBS model.

Rob, who has been doing BBS and Usenet for 15 years now

No it didn't come from the BBS model. What you must understand is the
UUCP protocol and how it was implemented to transport the files,
completely different from the first BBS. UUCP was being used to send
files back and forth and students decided to do something useful with
them, thus Usenet eventually was birthed. Some pertinent history of both
follows with the nod that a BBS was first and Usenet second, but Usenet
was based on something entirely different. I know, I run a Usenet system
back in the early 80's using UUCP to transfer the newsgroups. As a
side note, I've noticed spammers using the Fidonet gateway addresses I also
setup for the BBS systems to use Usenet newsgroups. I basically converted
newsgroups to a BBS format, and back again on the fly. Did that for years
until ISP's started being formed after the Internet was commercialized,
worst thing that ever happened if you ask me. PS, the first Usenet
newsgroups were tedious to read and respond to postings, but it got better.

Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after the release of V7
Unix with UUCP. Two Duke University grad students in North Carolina,
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of hooking computers together to
exchange information with the Unix community. Steve Bellovin, a grad
student at the University of North Carolina, put together the first
version of the news software using shell scripts and installed it on
the first two sites: "unc" and "duke."

The history of the computer based Bulletin Board System can be traced
back to Chicago, IL in 1978 to Ward Christensen, who wrote the first
BBS system software.