The newsgroups are the Internet equivalent of discussion groups involving millions of people from all over the world. Just about any topic imaginable has its own newsgroup. Since the Internet has no central control anyone can start a new newsgroup if they feel one is needed. There are now over 20,000 groups. Check out our page on Usenet .
Tin is a newsreader which is a program to read any newsgroup articles carried by the local site.
One of the functions of a newsreader is to keep track of newsgroups a user may be interested in reading. Tin also keeps track of the articles which have already been read. As news is read, the articles can be saved to a file, a copy can be mailed to someone, or deleted along with all articles about the same subject. A user starting Tin for the first time will usually be automatically subscribed to a list of newsgroups chosen by the administrator. FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, allows transfer of data from one computer to another.