V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (February 2016):

USENET
       USErs' NETwork (Internet)


The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):

Usenet
 /yoos'net/, /yooz?net/, n.

    [from ?Users' Network?; the original spelling was USENET, but the
    mixed-case form is now widely preferred] A distributed bboard (bulletin
    board) system supported mainly by Unix machines. Originally implemented in
    1979--1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve Daniel at
    Duke University and the University of North Carolina, it has swiftly grown
    to become international in scope and is now probably the largest
    decentralized information utility in existence. As of late 2002, it hosts
    over 100,000 newsgroups and an unguessably huge volume of new technical
    articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day (and that
    leaves out the graphics...).

    By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the original UUCP
    transport for Usenet was fading out of use ? almost all Usenet connections
    were over Internet links. A lot of newbies and journalists began to refer
    to ?Internet newsgroups? as though Usenet was and always had been just
    another Internet service. This ignorance greatly annoys experienced
    Usenetters.


The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

Usenet
Usenet news

    /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ (Or "Usenet news", from
   "Users' Network") A distributed bulletin board system and
   the people who post and read articles thereon.  Originally
   implemented in 1979 - 1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom
   Truscott and Steve Daniel at Duke University, and supported
   mainly by Unix machines, it swiftly grew to become
   international in scope and, before the advent of the web,
   probably the largest decentralised information utility in
   existence.

   Usenet encompassed government agencies, universities, high
   schools, businesses of all sizes and home computers of all
   descriptions.  As of early 1993, it hosted over 1200
   newsgroups ("groups" for short) and an average of 40
   megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of
   new technical articles, news, discussion, chatter, and
   flamage every day.  By November 1999, the number of groups
   had grown to over 37,000.

   To join in, you need a Usenet provider
   (https://www.usenetstorm.com).  Originally you needed a news
   reader program but there are now several web gateways,
   cheifly Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/)
   (originally Deja News).  Some web browsers used to include
   news readers and URLs beginning "news:" referred to Usenet
   newsgroups.

   Network News Transfer Protocol is a protocol used to
   transfer news articles between a news server and a news
   reader.  In the beginning, not all Usenet hosts were on the
   Internet.  The uucp protocol was sometimes used to
   transfer articles between servers, though this became
   increasingly rare with the spread of the Internet.

   [Gene Spafford , "What is Usenet?",
   regular posting to news:news.announce.newusers].

   (2017-09-26)