As an adjunct to Patrick's post: it has often struck me, from time to time and rather like a shovel to the head, that there's now a generation of internet users for whom the web has always existed, for it is older than they are. And there's a legion of users for whom the web is their primary use of the internet and may not even be aware that the web is but one use of said internet, eclipsing all others, save perhaps for email, but by no means making them any less relevant.

To them that aren't familiar with Usenet I give you: The History of Usenet. It changed your life and you didn't even know it.

Usenet was born approximately 3 decades ago, in 1979. It all began as a small communication network between a few universities in the United States used to trade information, news, and research results. It has grown from a simple design without an official structure, to a logical network linking millions of people and computers to over 100,000 different newsgroups and millions of bytes of articles. What began as two or three sites on a single network in 1979, expanded to 15 in 1980, to 150 in 1981, to 400 in 1982, to millions in 2003

(I know this isn't directly related to OS X but you gotta know your history.)