Tom Truscott is a computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University. Computer science (informally: CS or compsci) is, in its most general sense, the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. ... Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... Jim Ellis may be: Jim Ellis (computing) (died 2001), American computer scientist Jim Ellis (Seattle) (b. ... A graduate student (also, grad student or grad in American English, postgraduate student or postgrad in British English) is an individual who has completed a bachelors degree (B.A., B.S./B.Sc. ... Duke University is a private coeducational research university located in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Duke was founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, moved to Durham in 1892. ...
In 1979, Jim Ellis and TomTruscott, computer science graduate students at Duke University, were familiar with the first mailing lists on the ARPANET and wanted to make similar capabilities available to universities that weren't doing research with DARPA.
Ellis and Truscott called a meeting to discuss their idea, which was attended by Steve Bellovin, a computer science graduate student at the University of North Carolina.
TomTruscott and Steve Daniel (also a graduate student at Duke) then rewrote the program to create what was called Netnews Version A. Since Netnews was designed for Unix at a university, it was automatically categorized as public domain software under the conditions of the Unix license, which greatly facilitated its subsequent use and adoption.