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About Usenet
Usenet is an umbrella term for thousands of news servers throughout the whole world who exchange messages through the so called usenet protocol (in technical terms; articles being propagated). The technology behind Usenet was developed during the late 70’s at the Duke University in the United States of America. The name Usenet is a combination of the words Unix User Network. Every posted message is relatively swiftly available world wide, because all news servers are (indirectly) linked to each other.
Usenet was known before there was e-mail. It was possible for users to hold public discussions in several subject ranked and related groups. Nowadays are referred to as newsgroups. Since a couple of years so called binaries (files, or parts of them) are posted with text messages (articles). These binaries can be downloaded through a modern news client; a program that can retrieve messages from the server.
For a rough explanation on Usenet see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
For an explanatory glossary see: http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=usenet.html#glossary