Here's a list of topics for a history of the net.  Not all these are
in the right order.  I haven't included everything here.  If you know
an event that's not super-specific to a group, and you think was of
prominent importance to the structure of the net, MAIL that to me.
-----------------
The human-nets digest on the arpanet
The uucp program
The A-news system (Bellovin, Truscott)
The first newsgroups
        "fa" groups
        "net." groups
        The mistake of net.general
Creating groups by typo or whim - net.joke, net.bizarre, net.flame, net.gdead
                                net.wobegon and others
The B news software (Horton, Glickman)
Pathalias software (Honeyman)
Decvax and Bill Shannon's contribution
Imminent death of net predicted
AT&T's contribution (allegra, ihnp4 etc.)
Widespread net growth and international growth
Domain style naming (Postel et al)
The net.jokes.q creation and deletion
Formation of the "Backbone"
net.women.only experiment
Arpa mailing lists merge with usenet groups.
Subgroups to divert traffic:
        net.startrek, net.abortion, source code discussion
Imminent death of net predicted
The re-emergence of mailing lists
The emergence of voting for creating newsgroups
Notesfiles (?)
RN & Kill files (Wall)
News batching and compression
THe problems with the old releases of B news
Moderated newsgroups
        mod.announce
        mod.newprod and commercial information on the net
Stargate
Imminent death of net predicted
Big Net personal fights
        some result in lawsuit threats (MES)
        some result in people being bounced temporarily from the net (Maroney)
        some result in people being removed permanently.
The great renaming
The merging of moderated groups into the hierarchy.
The decline in propagation for groups outside of "comp" and "news"
Creation of rec.humor.funny (first ultra-moderated non-mailing-list)
Battle over the expiry dates on rec.mag.otherrealms.
The attempt to form comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac. (Webber)
Imminent death of net predicted
The misnaming of soc.culture.china -> 30 day voting time.
Attempt to remove talk.bizarre from the net for the "VOLUME,VOLUME,VOLUME" game.
"jj@portal" (Rob Noha) begs for money on the net.
General problems with Portal, and the issue of pay-for-access net sites.
Attempts to form groups for drugs and sex.
Creation of the "alt" hierarchy.
Imminent death of net predicted
Telebit releases the Trailblazer.
UUNET arrives (Adams) (Seismo fades)
Internet begins to pervade the net.  The backbone begins to fade.
NNTP causes news to propagate too fast.
Crazy creation of groups in the alt hierarchy. (Weiner)
AT&T decides not to forward mail.
"biz" and "inet" hierarchies.  "Gnu" hierarcy.
Imminent death of net predicted
comp.binaries.ibm.pc goes to 8 megs/month, gets moderated in first
        (and only) moderator election.
The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts)
The battle over rec.humor.funny (Templeton, Richmond)
------------------
This only touches some groups.  Other groups all have their histories
of battles, common questions, hoaxes, problem users and attempts to
split the group.  Groups that probably deserve a section are:
        sf-lovers (with drwho and startrek)
        women
        men
        sources (of various sorts)
        binaries (of various sorts)
        unix groups
        music.misc
        politics, philosophy and religion
        .. and many others ..
        news.*

Plus chapters on:
        Groups that never made it
        UUPC, Xenix and the arrival of small machines

--
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473