Everything about The Great Renaming totally explained
The
Great Renaming was a restructuring of
Usenet newsgroups that took place in
1987. The primary reason was said to be the difficulty of maintaining a list of all the existing groups. An alternative explanation was that
European networks refused to pay for some of the discussion-intensive groups regarding
religion and
racism; this resulted in a need for categorization of all such newsgroups. The suggested category for the newsgroups less popular among European networks was
talk.* In either account,
B News maintainer and
UUNET founder
Rick Adams is generally considered to be the initiator of the Renaming.
Before the Renaming, the newsgroups were categorized into three hierarchies:
fa.* for groups gatewayed from
ARPANET,
mod.* for
moderated discussions, and
net.* for unmoderated groups. Names of the groups were said to be rather haphazard.
While reorganization discussions had taken place earlier, software limitations prevented the adoption of a consistent organization scheme. Improvements introduced by Adams in
1986 with
B News version 2.11 removed the requirement for moderated groups to use the "mod." prefix, allowed posting to moderated groups using
newsreaders rather than separate
e-mail programs, and eliminated the flat storage method, which required that the first 14 characters of all newsgroups be unique. With this added flexibility and transparency, it became practical to undertake the effort.
The backbone providers, "the
backbone cabal," were instrumental in this reorganization of Usenet since they'd a great influence with respect to supporting a new newsgroup. Some suggest that members of the cabal had interests in bundling certain newsgroups into the
talk.* hierarchy, so that they wouldn't be objected to by their supervisors.
A more detailed account of reasons behind the Renaming can also be seen in a Usenet article posted by
Gene Spafford at
net.news and
net.news.group.
These newsgroups were categorized into a series of
hierarchies, to make it easier for newsgroups to be created and distributed. The original hierarchies were
comp.*,
misc.*,
news.*,
rec.*,
sci.*,
soc.*, and
talk.*.
These hierarchies, known collectively as the "
Big Seven," were open and free for anyone to participate in (except for the moderated newsgroups), though they were subject to a few general rules governing their naming and distribution.
Several other popular hierarchies remained on Usenet as well, such as the
k12.* hierarchy, which covers topics especially relating to
education,
schools, and
colleges.
An additional hierarchy,
alt.*, was also created shortly after the Renaming. The term
alt is short for "alternative". The
alt.* hierarchy was meant to be completely free from centralized control, and it wasn't subject to the formalities of the Big Seven.
In the mid-
1990s, when the Usenet traffic grew significantly, one more hierarchy,
humanities.*, was introduced, and with the seven hierarchies created by the Renaming, comprises today's so-called "
Big 8."
Further Information
Get more info on 'Great Renaming'.
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