Duke to shutdown Usenet server, home to the first electronic newsgroups(news.duke.edu)
news.duke.edu
Duke to shutdown Usenet server, home to the first electronic newsgroups
http://news.duke.edu/2010/05/usenet.html
http://news.duke.edu/2010/05/usenet.html
By the way, not all in the Duke piece is to be taken as gospel. I think the 1983 "get a file from one computer to another across the country" may actually have been UUCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP ). And Arpanet was already on, with FTP, etc. although at relatively few sites.
(A couple of years later, getting a complete Emacs tarball from prep.ai.mit.edu was still a sporting proposition - watching hash characters march across the terminal on an ftp without auto-resume - actually, no resume at all, just retry ...)