Usenet was developed in 1979 and is a discussion system that is available on computers worldwide. Users read and publish messages (articles or posts) in one or more categories called newsgroups. Usenet is similar in many ways to a bulletin board system (BBS) and is the forerunner of today’s widespread Internet forums. As with web forums and BBSs, discussions are threaded, although posts are stored sequentially on the server. The name comes from the term “user network”.