Usenet, authentication, and engineering: early design decisions for Usenet
I'm so happy to see a post about Usenet.  In some ways, Usenet is doing just fine, thank you very much.  It's been forgotten by most of the world, and even as a method of sharing illegal binaries it was surpassed by bittorrent years ago.  But there's a small core of users that still participate on Usenet the way it was intended: anonymous conversation with like-minded individuals, each armed with a kill file to weed out the abusers.  In fact, I just posted a link to this article to comp.misc.  If you're nostalgic for the old experience, go get yourself a free Usenet account at http://news.solani.org (there are other free portals, but because they are more popular they suffer bandwidth issues and struggle to support their users) and fire up Thunderbird, slrn, Xnews, tin, alpine, pan, knode, or other client.  Have fun!