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distributed bboard (bulletin board) system supported mainly by Unix machines. Originally implemented in 19791980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to become international in scope and is now probably the largest decentralized information utility in existence. As of early 1996, it hosts over 10,000 newsgroups and an average of over 500 megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day. |
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By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the original UUCP transport for Usenet was fading out of use (see UUCPNET) almost all Usenet connections were over Internet links. A lot of newbies and journalists began to refer to ''Internet newsgroups" as though Usenet was and always had been just another Internet service. This ignorance greatly annoys experienced Usenetters. |
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user n. 1. Someone doing 'real work' with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them. |
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The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as real winners.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context. |
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user-friendly adj. Programmer-hostile. Generally used by hackers in a critical tone, to describe systems that hold the user's hand so obsessively that they make it painful for the more experienced and knowledgeable to get |
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