1. Dutch Usenet Guide

Usenet Guide

Introduction 
Usenet was born before the internet. At first Usenet was used to discuss with users around the world on all sort of topics. To make Usenet more evident 9 newsgroups were born as a result from people with different interests wanted to discuss: comp.* (computer related discussions), humanities.* (philosophy, fine arts and literature), misc.* (miscellaneous topics), news.* (news discussions and announcements), rec.* (recreation and entertainment), sci.* (science related discussions), soc.* (social discussions), talk.* (discuss controversial topics) and alt.* at the beginning to exchange self created software, but soon grew out as the newsgroup were binaries (movies, games, music and software) were posted and still are posted. Because the binaries (movies, games, music and software) are posted in alt.*. Alt.* became the biggest newsgroup.

Usenet Providers
Nowadays the alt.* newsgroup consists of more than 100.000 newsgroups, containing movies, games, music, software etc. The Usenet Providers (such as Giganews, Newsgroupdirect and Newshosting) are offering access at these newsgroups through their servers. So you are able to download from newsgroups through the servers from Giganews, Newsgroupdirect or Newshosting. These servers often offer SSL (Secure Sockets Layer, protocol to code data so it can't be monitored by 3rd parties), high retention (the number of days files such as movies are kept on the servers) and lots of connections (the more connections/threads the faster you can download).

Usenet Newsreaders and indexing sites
Ok, so you know when Usenet was born, what usenet is and how you can connect to usenet. The only thing you have to know now is how to download the Usenet files. The Usenet Providers aren't software applications to download with, they purely are the servers containing the files. Compare Usenet Providers to your ISP. In order to download Usenet files you will need to have a Newsreader such as Newsbin Pro or Grabit. And an indexing site were you can grab newsgroup files (nzb's). Free indexing sites are: nzbindex.com and tvnzb.com. Install your preferred Newsreader, and configure Grabit or Newsbin Pro, once you have done this you can search and download a newsgroup file (nzb) on nzbindex.com or tvnzb.com.