Let’s take a look these three things and get you up and running with Usenet. It’s all the benefits of BitTorrent and none of the downsides.Īll you need to get started with Usenet is a Usenet service provider, an NZB index, and a Usenet client.

When you load an NZB file in a Usenet client, you are establishing a direct one-to-one link with your Usenet provider-no extra peers, outside access to your machine, or sharing of files from your collection back to the internet. To bring it back to the BitTorrent comparison, NZB files are much like Torrent files, except instead of pointing you to thousands of file sharers around the world, NZB files point you to the thousands of pieces of the file on a high-speed Usenet server. NZB files did away with all that tedious hands-on activity and made it simple to retrieve the entire file set with nothing more than a single NZB file.

In the early 90s, for example, doing something as simple as downloading a wallpaper pack was a multi-step and failure-prone procedure. Back in the olden days of binary sharing on Usenet you had to, by hand, find all the pieces of a shared file and reassemble them yourself using a variety of programs. NZB files are XML indexes that make sharing and accessing files on Usenet extremely easy. Eventually, people decided they’d had enough and the NZB file was born.Īlthough the origin of the NZB format is murky (some accounts claim it was created by Newzbin, others that it was first created by Dutch computer enthusiasts and lifted by Newzbin), the practical application of NZB files is perfectly clear. Accessing the binary groups was an arcane art and required multiple steps as well as a lot of frustration when those multipart files didn’t download or unpack correctly.

You can find virtually any type of file that you can imagine downloading in those groups-from tiny files to multi-gigabyte Blu-ray image files. These files are broken up into pieces and shared as text blocks in thousands of sequential Usenet messages.

Binary groups are sub groups that specialize in the distribution of non-text files.

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