 In 1979, two students at Duke University, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, originated the idea of using Bourne shell scripts to transfer news and messages on a serial line UUCP connection with nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Following public release of the software in 1980, the mesh of UUCP hosts forwarding on the Usenet news rapidly expanded.UUCPnet, as it would later be named, also created gateways and links between FidoNet and dial-up BBS hosts.