LUSENET was a free public

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active from 1995 to 2005. Created as an experiment by

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

computer scientist and early

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

entrepreneur

Philip Greenspun Philip Greenspun (born September 28, 1963) is an American computer scientist, educator, early Internet entrepreneur, and pilot who was a pioneer in developing online communities like photo.net. Biography Greenspun was born on September 28, 1 ...

, the

TCL TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company **TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited, a ...

-based system was named as a punning combination of

USENET Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

and

luser Before the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, Internet slang defined a luser (sometimes expanded to local user; also luzer or luzzer) as a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user.p. 214 The word is a blend of "loser" a ...

. Because LUSENET of France allowed anyone to start their own forum for free and did not have

banner ad A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking ...

s, it became an important alternative to commercial sites run by

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

and

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

. It was long favored by non-profits and eventually

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

gers in the late 1990s, such as one for the unofficial San Francisco History Index, and the popular I Love Music forums. The system running LUSENET crashed in March 2005 and it is no longer active. The content is frozen as of that date. The database on this ancient unmaintained Linux machine suffered some sort of ugly failure in early March 2005. Consequently postings have been disabled and moderators are encouraged to move their forums to groups.yahoo.com or some other similar advertising-supported service. The greenspun.com forums were easy to build ten years ago but became difficult to maintain in a world full of spammers, etc.

External links

LUSENET
Internet forums {{internet-forum-stub * http://greenspun.com/bboard/index.tcl