"But this was how it was done back in 1979 when they put all of this
together. And not just for Usenet. Early email server storage was the
same way, with every email being a single file on the drive in a
directory that indicated the user name of the owner/recipient. Or
something like that. I used to have the SRI Guide to internet
configurations from 1992, but I am pretty sure that got tossed. (Also,
SRI will come up again in a later post.) But there is still some history
out there if you are interested.
It was okay at the time. The internet was small. There was a limited
number of users. And the UNIX machines driving all of this were among
the most capable around and were largely funded directly or indirectly
by government research grants.
Anyway, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Later, it had to get
fixed and the committee driving all of this came up with a method that
did not litter your drive with hundreds of thousands of tiny files
taking up more space than they should. But that came later after it was
practically a crisis and hosting Usenet was a durability test."
https://tagn.wordpress.com/2023/12/03/usenet-newsgroups-part-ii-what-is-on-that-cd-and-why-your-hard-drive-isnt-a-database/