On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 02:25:26 +0000, Larry Dighera wrote:

Back in the '80's most news reading clients imposed a mandatory visit to
the news.newusers newsgroup upon their first time use, thus new users had
an opportunity to enlighten themselves about Usenet before using it.

This was pre-HTTP, recall, so anyone reading USENET was using a USENET
client (with the odd outlier using a news/mail gateway). Nowadays, people
don't need to use those clients. Thus, many don't even realize there is
such an entity as USENET operating behind the scenes of their "aviation
web forum with the funny name with lots of dots".

- Andrew