Netnews:
Netnews, sometimes called Usenet, was arguably the first social network. Quarterman describes it as “one of the oldest cooperative networks”. It had a profound influence on online socializing, including helping to give to the world the current slang meanings of words such as “spam” , “troll”, and “flame”. It was where many technologies we now take for granted were first announced, including Linux, the World Wide Web, and the graphical web browser. But its design was a function of both its design goals and the technological context of the time. I describe those and a variety of other early design decisions, those which were right, those which were wrong, and those which were inevitable.
