"Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement pro

"Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of Duke University came up with the idea as a replacement for a local announcement program, and established a link with nearby University of North Carolina using Bourne shell scripts written by Steve Bellovin. The public release of news was in the form of conventional compiled software, written by Steve Daniel and Truscott. In 1980, Usenet was connected to ARPANET through UC Berkeley which had connections to both Usenet and ARPANET. " "Usenet gained 50 member sites in its first year, including Reed College, University of Oklahoma, and Bell Labs,[5] and the number of people using the network increased dramatically; " "UUCP networks spread quickly due to the lower costs involved, and the ability to use existing leased lines, X.25 links or even ARPANET connections. By 1983, thousands of people participated from more than 500 hosts, mostly universities and Bell Labs sites but also a growing number of Unix-related companies; the number of hosts nearly doubled to 940 in 1984. More than 100 newsgroups existed, more than 20 devoted to Unix and other computer-related topics, and at least a third to recreation" Sites participating in Usenet were using UUCP, which also allowed email. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Network