I was reading this USENET group non-stop for two days back then, retelling the posts to all my friends.
Just read this: "PLEASE STOP FLOODING THE ONLY NARROW CHANNEL WITH BOGUS MESSAGES. WITH SILLY QUESTIONS. NOTE THAT IT'S NEITHER A TOY NOR A MEAN TO. REACH TO YOUR RELATIVES OR FRIENDS. WE NEED THE BANDWIDTH TO HELP. TO ORGANIZE THE RESISTANCE, PLEASE, DO NOT (EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY). HELP THESE FASCISTS! BEFORE SENDING SOMETHING TO SOVIET UNION PLEASE. THINK TWICE (OR BETTER THRICE). THANK YOU"
That should read, "re-inveneted in USSR".
Tom Truscott [0] and Jim Ellis [1] are the creators of Usenet. Bnews was indeed released in '82, using UUCP to exchange between machines. [2] This was before NNTP. In '95, Truscott and Ellis received the Flame award at USENIX.[3] Guess what for?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_%28computing%29
[2] http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/node256.html
[3] 1995: "the third Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis for their work in creating USENET." ~ https://www.usenix.org/about/flame
Do they mean Usenet doesn't require IP to work? And did that matter here? Would actually be fascinating if some alternative federated server comms played a pivotal role, but more likely this is careless writing.
Some gray beard can probably speak more intelligently than me about this, but I think people would basically specify a series of hops. Each hop would store-and-forward the message to the next hop. Nowadays people talk about delay and disruption tolerant networks, which use similar techniques.
Usenet systems had established neighbors communicating with UUCP and used a flooding algorithm to get messages to the entire network of systems. All built on top of these point-to-point links, could be done over the Internet (NNTP) but it wasn't required. This was a big enough thing that specialized modems for UUCP were popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Hand-Untold-Dangerous-Legacy-eboo...
The coup attempt was an act of desperation.
This is one of the main reasons the US government and the corporations which monopolize the last mile of communications effectively killed off Usenet in 2009.
