A General Description of Usenet and Newsgroups
Here is a awesome general description of Usenet by netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
Usenet is a world-wide distributed discussion system. It is made up of set of “newsgroups” with names that are classified hierarchically by subject. “Articles” or “messages” are “posted” to these newsgroups by users on computers with the appropriate software — these articles are then broadcast to other interconnected computer systems via a wide
variety of networks. Some newsgroups are “moderated”; in these newsgroups, the articles are first sent to a moderator for approval before they appear in the newsgroup. Usenet is available on a wide variety of computer systems and networks, but the bulk of modern Usenet traffic is transported over either the Internet or UUCP:
