Long before the advent of the web, Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created an online program called Usenet that let people with
similar interests find each other by posting comments to newsgroups. Like an online bulletin board, Usenet topics were divided into different categories, such as computers, science,
humanities, and society, and users wrote replies to each other's posts. More than 800 million messages going back to 1981 are now archived at Google Groups.
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