Google is one of our favorite search engines; it is clean, quick, and doesn't spend its time trying to load fancy advertising. They bought the deja news archive a while back, and today they brought on line a collection of NetNews articles going back to 1981.
NetNews has a special connection to Duke University (and North Carolina.) Back in the late 1970's, the two university's graduate departments of Computer Science shared many resources. On the old UNIX systems, there was a program news that allowed an admin to give news to the user community. When the community spanned multiple machines (Such as Duke and UNC), news was inadequate. A couple graduate students, Steve Bellovin of UNC and Tom Truscott of Duke, came up with a means to distribute news across a network.
For many of us older geeks, our first experience with the Internet Community came from postings to Net News. For your amusement, here is one of the Alpha Geek's first posts.