Newsgroups/Netnews were not the front page (whatever that means) of the internet since the internet did not yet exist (and the internet is a collection of interconnected networks ... it's a category mistake to talk about a "front page" for such a thing). There was the government-run ARPANET first developed in 1969 (I was among the developers), and there was a UUCP-based network over phone lines between UNIX hosts started in 1980 (shortly after UUCP was released) over which Netnews ran. Netnews was known as "the poor man's ARPANET" as any UNIX machine could receive it whereas being on the ARPANET was heavily restricted. These are totally different technologies, and different yet was the future internet which was based on the TCP/IP protocols developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (but based on packet switching like the ARPANET). In no way was usenet a "competitor" of the ARPANET (and certainly not the internet), or even of the World Wide Web ... these are very different sorts of things. It was more like a big brother to the many Bulletin Board Systems that proliferated that ran over FidoNet and BITNET.

The news industry had nothing to do with the name "usenet", which came into use in 1982 as a result of a vote by the participants (I was one) at a USENIX conference. The "use" part came from USENIX (the UNIX user's organization). It was decided that "usenet" would refer just to the newsgroups, and the network itself was called UUCPNET.

There is of course no measure of the IQ of users of usenet (or of the ARPANET, or of the internet, or of the web, which again are different things). One can suspect that it was above average because the nodes were mostly universities, but not everyone going to universities is above average in intelligence.

There is also of course no measure of their political leanings, but since these were universities shortly after the invasion of VietNam and its accompanying draft and fresh from the development of the civil rights, LGBT, women's rights, and environmental movements, they tended to be quite liberal, but of course there was a spectrum and some extreme outliers (Clayton Cramer comes to mind). The most memorable libertarian I recall was Laura Creighton who, notably, was not a man. I particularly remember her saying, without any irony, that "If I thought I didn't have free will I'd shoot myself". Ah, those were the days.

For an excellent compendium of what early computer discussion networks (or "conferencing systems" as they were often called at the time) were like, as well as a bunch of technical background on the actual data networks and protocols of the time, I'd highly recommend John S. Quarterman's The Matrix, first published in 1989. That is, it predates the World Wide Web, and was only about six years after "The Internet" largely (weasel-word conspicuously noted) replaced "ARPANET" as the designation for the widely-used (amongst university, government, military, and some tech-company) public networking protocol and system based on TCP/IP. Late-breaking news about the effect of computer networks on notable political protests in China are included in the forward.

At the Internet Archive (and apparently from Kahle's own personal collection): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputernet00quar/page/n3/...>

I'd begun using Usenet at about the same time as the book was published, and can't personally attest to the information jibal's giving, but will vouch that their account is far more accurate than that to which they're responding.

Just because I wasn't a first-person witness to the start of ARPANET in 1969 or the early years of the newsgroups doesn't mean that I can't be an accurate witness to the newsgroups or the internet when I encountered them in 1991, which was at least 6 months before the web starting having any significant influence on the internet.

In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET.

I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future.

I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers?

E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?