http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-06-29-ellis-usenet.htm 06/29/2001 HARMONY, Pa. (AP) Jim Ellis, who helped create the information-sharing electronic bulletin boards that predated the World Wide Web, has died. He was 45. Ellis, who had been battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma for two years, died at home in Beaver County early Thursday, said his wife, Carolyn. Most recently an Internet security consultant with Sun Microsystems, Ellis was one of the creators of Usenet, which linked computers and allowed people to share information and reply to messages. Usenet began in 1979 when Ellis and another Duke graduate student, Tom Truscott, thought of hooking together computers to share information. At the beginning of 1980, the network consisted of two sites at Duke and one at the University of North Carolina. Usenet quickly became a popular means of trading and sharing information internationally before the World Wide Web came into existence. By using bulletin boards later called newsgroups people who were linked to the system could share information and hold discussions. By late 1999, the number of newsgroups was estimated at more than 37,000. Allan Fisher, chief executive officer of Carnegie Technology Education, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University which develops Web-based courses, said Usenet could be considered "the first big community application" of an interconnected system of computers. "The social importance was it allowed this community building and prefigured a lot of what happened on the Web," Fisher said. Ellis and the other creators of Usenet, including Steve Bellovin and Steve Daniel, made no money from it, said Carolyn Ellis, because it was not set up as a commercial venture. "They launched this thing and had no idea where it was going," she said. After working in North Carolina, Ellis and his wife moved to western Pennsylvania in 1986 when he took a position with the Super Computing Center in Pittsburgh. Later, he joined Sun Microsystems, working from his home in western Pennsylvania. "He had a good wit. He loved bridge. He loved his family of course," Carolyn Ellis said. "He was not afraid of his impending death." ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email isn-unsubscribeat_private
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Jul 03 2001 - 01:42:56 PDT