In 1979, Ellis and fellow Duke University graduate student Tom Truscott came up with a plan to share “news” postings between computers. Early in 1980 “Usenet” (short for “user’s network”) was born and quickly spread around the early Internet.
Later called “newsgroups”, the bulletin boards allow people all over the world to participate in discussions on thousands of topics, which greatly facilitated the Internet’s growth in the days before the World Wide Web was invented. Ellis died June 28 at home in Pennsylvania from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was 45.