Usenet
termops cultureISP & telecom
The distributed discussion system built in 1979-1980 by Duke and UNC graduate students on top of UUCP, later carried by NNTP: articles posted to hierarchical newsgroups flood from server to server, with no central host and no owner.
It was the internet's public square before the web, and it invented most of what online life still runs on - FAQ, flame war, spam, sockpuppet, netiquette, and the September that never ended. Linus Torvalds announced Linux on comp.os.minix; Tim Berners-Lee announced the web on alt.hypertext; the alt hierarchy existed precisely because someone objected to central approval. Its flood-fill design is also the ancestor of every eventually-consistent replication scheme since.
Also known as: nntp, newsgroups, alt hierarchy, netnews