When I first got online, I was using AOL. one of the geeky things Ive always heard about was the Usenet. At that time, I used the Usenet as a forum. reading about topics that I was interested in. Ive even used the newsgroups as late as about 2001, when I use to frequent an Xbox group to read about info on video games. Of coarse we all know that you can use outlook (on windows) as a client to access the newsgroups, but there is a lot of other things about newsgroups that many may not know about, which would call for more robust clients.

Being a newsgroup novice, I decided to read up on using newsgroups. Found out something pretty interesting. Ever heard of a file format called NZB?

Well large files are distributed on newsgroups by having the file broken down to multiple little files and attached to post’s. So you may see a set of 40-200 post labeled 1/100, 2/100. Savvy Usenet users would be able to download all of those parts, combine them, and have a full file. This method was a really popular way to distribute “warez” or Porn, but is used for all types of files (some good, lots bad).

NZB is somewhat new. It works similar to a torrent file. It holds the information as to where you get all the parts of a particular file. That way you can just load the one NZB file into your Usenet client (that support NZB’s) and the client can then go out and retrieve all of the parts, without you having to go to each individual post and download the files yourselves. Since the implementation of the NZB file was introduced, it has become pretty popular, NZB search websites and directories have popped up all over the place, such as Binsearch.info or the popular TVNZB.com(nsfw)

Right now things are still a little complicated, there are many steps as to get things going when it comes to downloading files from the Usenet, which may include having to pay for Usenet access. But it has been a while since Ive looked into the Usenet and thought the whole NZB implementation was pretty interesting (and possibly a good alternative to Bittorrent)