Usenet was created in 1979 by college students that wanted to communicate between campuses more easily.

Usenet is one of the oldest applications of the internet. It is at least 12 years older than the World Wide Web.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was first released on Usenet in 1991.

Tim Berners-Lee, father of the web, announced the birth of the World Wide Web project to Usenet in 1991.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi was discussed on Usenet in June of 1982, a full year before its release.

The use of emoticons was first proposed in November of 1982.

Microsoft Windows got its first mention on Usenet in November of 1983.

The "Great Renaming" in 1987 gave Usenet newsgroups the hierarchical structure seen today.

In June of 1989, firsthand accounts of the Tiananmen Square violence appeared on Usenet.

A quake-related newsgroup was created as an information resource mere hours after the San Francisco earthquake in October of 1989.

News of a unified Germany was posted in November of 1989 shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Linux was formally announced to the Usenet community in October of 1991. Currently there are hundreds Linux newsgroups.

Starting April 29, 1992, the Rodney King verdict and L.A. riots were discussed in detail, nearly in real-time.

Usenet is not controlled by a central authority; it is a network of independent servers.

Only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of newsgroups receives the majority of content.

The term 'spam' was first used to describe an unsolicited commercial Usenet post.

The PNG image format was developed through extensive Usenet collaboration.

The extremely popular Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was first started by members of the rec.arts.movies newsgroup.

The first Usenet software was designed to handle only a few dozen articles per day.

The alt.* hierarchy was the last to be created, but currently has many more newsgroups than other hierarchies.