O'Reilly Network: I Remember USENET [Dec. 21, 2001] And the network took over my life. I loved participating in it, and my favorite topic was the network itself. Many of us loved to discuss its future and its politics, for we knew in some way (though none of us knew fully) that this was the future of the world. I helped maintain groups and wrote tiny pieces of software to help the Net grow. Others contributed much more software, all of it free and all of it source code, years before the free software movement would take full form.