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Use Net Before there were Message Boards, Wikis or the World
Wide Web, before the Internet even existed in its present form
note , there was Usenet, one of the first distributed discussion
systems around. Until the rise of Web-based forums after 2000,
Usenet was the place to discuss things on the Internet, and
quite a few tropes regarding message boards in general started
here.  Usenet began in 1979, when programmers at Duke University
realised that UNIX's uucp (Unix to Unix CoPy) program, which was
already being used to transfer email between sites, could also
be used to transfer broadcast messages between sites (the
original idea was to enable "community calendar"-style
announcements, hence "news") and allow for discussion areas,
which they decided to call "newsgroups". Eventually, as access
to the Internet became more common, uucp was replaced by the
Network News Transfer Protocol, and in 1985, the system itself
was reorganised into 7 branches