Port 119: NNTP — The First Global Conversation

Port 119 carries NNTP: the Network News Transfer Protocol. Every Usenet article, every newsgroup post, every message in humanity's first global digital conversation flows through this port.

Before the World Wide Web. Before social media. Before Reddit, before Twitter, before Facebook. There was Usenet, and there was port 119.

What NNTP Does

NNTP is an application protocol for transporting news articles between servers and delivering them to readers.¹ When you connect to a news server on port 119, you're tapping into a distributed network that spans the globe. Your client can list newsgroups, download article headers, retrieve full messages, and post new articles that will propagate to every connected server on Earth.

The protocol is text-based, like SMTP or HTTP. A simple conversation looks like this:

Client: GROUP comp.lang.python
Server: 211 5234 1 5234 comp.lang.python
Client: ARTICLE 1234
Server: 220 1234 <abc123@news.example.com>
Server: [article headers and body follow]

Simple commands. Simple responses. But underneath this simplicity lies something remarkable: a flooding algorithm that ensures every message reaches every server, everywhere, without any central coordination.²

The Story: Graduate Students and Telephone Modems

In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University had a problem. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis knew about ARPANET's mailing lists, the discussion forums of the research elite. But Duke wasn't on ARPANET. Neither were most universities. They wanted the same ability to share ideas across distances, but they needed to build it themselves.³

Their solution was elegant and low-tech. Unix systems had a utility called UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) that could transfer files over telephone modem connections. What if you could use that to copy messages between machines? What if every machine could copy to every other machine it knew about?

They recruited Steve Bellovin from the University of North Carolina, who wrote the first version of the software in three pages of shell script.⁴ Duke and UNC became the first two Usenet hosts. The "Users Network" was born.

The system spread through academic institutions like a benevolent virus. By 1983, there were over 100 newsgroups. By the early 1990s, Usenet had become the Internet's public square, carrying discussions on everything from physics to philosophy, from computer programming to cat pictures.

But the original UUCP-based transfer was slow and clunky. Messages could take days to propagate. As local area networks and the Internet spread, something faster was needed.

In 1984, Brian Kantor at UC San Diego and Phil Lapsley at UC Berkeley created NNTP, a TCP/IP protocol that could transfer articles in real-time.⁵ RFC 977 was published in February 1986, and port 119 became the nerve ending of the world's first global conversation.⁶

How the Flood Works

The core insight of Usenet is the flood-fill algorithm. When a server receives a new article (whether posted locally or received from a peer), it offers that article to every other server it knows. If the remote server doesn't have it yet, it accepts the article and repeats the process with its own peers.⁷

Every article carries a globally unique Message-ID in the format <serial@hostname>. Servers track which Message-IDs they've seen, rejecting duplicates. Through this simple mechanism, an article posted in Tokyo reaches servers in São Paulo, Cape Town, and Stockholm, without any central routing authority deciding how it gets there.⁸

This is pure decentralization. No master server. No single point of failure. No one to ask permission from. The network itself is the storage system, redundantly copying everything everywhere.

The cost of this freedom: every server pays the price of storing every message. Today, that means terabytes per day.⁹

The Hierarchy of Human Interest

Usenet organized discussions into newsgroups, arranged in hierarchies. The original "Big 7" (later Big 8) covered the major categories of human discourse:¹⁰

• comp.* — computers and programming
• sci.* — science and research
• rec.* — recreation and hobbies
• soc.* — social issues and cultures
• talk.* — debate and controversy
• news.* — Usenet itself
• misc.* — everything else
• humanities.* — literature, art, philosophy (added 1995)

Creating a newsgroup in the Big 8 required formal proposal, discussion, and voting. This was too slow for some.

In 1987, John Gilmore and Brian Reid created the alt.* hierarchy, where anyone could create any newsgroup without approval.¹¹ The name stood for "alternative." It became the wild west of Usenet: alt.folklore.urban, alt.music.progressive, alt.religion.scientology, alt.sex, alt.binaries.

The alt hierarchy grew to dwarf the Big 8. Today, alt.binaries alone accounts for over 99% of all Usenet traffic by volume.¹²

The September That Never Ended

Every September, universities welcomed new students who gained Internet access for the first time. These freshmen would flood Usenet with questions that had been answered a thousand times, with posts that violated unwritten etiquette, with enthusiasm unconstrained by experience. Old-timers dreaded September. But by October, the newcomers had learned the culture, and equilibrium returned.¹³

Then came September 1993.

America Online began offering Usenet access to its subscribers. Suddenly, the network wasn't growing by a few thousand students per year. It was growing by millions of ordinary people who had never heard of netiquette, who didn't know about FAQs, who had no context for the culture they were joining.¹⁴

Dave Fischer posted to alt.folklore.computers on January 25, 1994: "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net history as the September that never ended."¹⁵

The Eternal September had begun. The social fabric that had held Usenet together for a decade stretched, frayed, and in many places, tore completely. The newcomers never stopped coming. The old culture never quite reasserted itself.

The Security of No Security

NNTP was designed in an era of trust. The protocol includes no authentication, no encryption, no verification of identity. Anyone can post as anyone. Anyone can forge headers. This wasn't an oversight—it reflected the academic culture of the 1980s, where the network's users were colleagues, not adversaries.

This trust had consequences.

Spam: The first commercial Usenet spam appeared on April 12, 1994, when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel posted their "Green Card Lottery" advertisement to thousands of newsgroups.¹⁶ The floodgates opened.

Cancel Wars: NNTP includes a CANCEL control message that requests servers to delete a specific article. Because nothing is authenticated, anyone can forge a cancel for anyone else's post. Spam fighters used cancel bots to automatically remove spam. Spammers used cancel messages to silence their critics. The network became a battleground.¹⁷

Sporgery: In the late 1990s, attackers flooded alt.religion.scientology with over 1.4 billion bytes of forged messages, using the names of legitimate posters attached to racist content. At its peak, over 90% of the newsgroup's traffic was forged garbage.¹⁸

The community developed defenses—PGP-signed cancel messages, spam filtering, moderated newsgroups—but the fundamental architecture couldn't be secured. A protocol built on trust cannot survive the loss of trust.

Modern NNTP: TLS and Obscurity

RFC 3977, published in October 2006, updated NNTP for the modern era.¹⁹ RFC 4642 added TLS support via STARTTLS on port 119, while port 563 became the standard for "implicit TLS" connections where encryption begins immediately.²⁰

Today, Usenet still exists. Commercial providers like Newshosting and Eweka maintain massive server farms with thousands of days of article retention. But the discussion groups that made Usenet culturally significant have largely migrated to Reddit, Discord, and web forums.

What remains is primarily alt.binaries: terabytes of files shared through a protocol designed for text messages. The network that once carried humanity's first global conversation now carries... other things.

Related Ports

Summary

Port 119 is where humanity first proved that a global, decentralized conversation was possible. Before Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first line of HTML, millions of people were arguing about Star Trek, debugging each other's code, and creating the cultural norms that would shape the Internet for decades.

NNTP's flood-fill architecture embodies a radical ideal: that ideas, once shared, belong to everyone, propagating unstoppably to every corner of the network. That same architecture made the network impossible to moderate, impossible to secure, and ultimately, impossible to sustain as a civil commons.

The protocol still runs. The servers still flood. But the conversation has moved on, leaving port 119 as a monument to what happens when you build a network where everything is connected and nothing can be controlled.