Ellis, who helped create Usenet, the information-sharing electronic bulletin board that predated the Web, died Thursday following a two-year battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Ellis, along with fellow Duke graduate Tom Truscott, was inspired in 1979 to try linking computers to share information and reply to messages. By early 1980, they had created a network consisting of two computers at Duke and another at the University of North Carolina. Ellis had most recently been an Internet security consultant with Sun Microsystems.
Passage: Jim Ellis, 45
Ellis, who helped create Usenet, the information-sharing electronic bulletin board that predated the Web, died Thursday following a two-year battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Ellis, along with fellow Duke graduate Tom Truscott, was inspired in 1979 to try linking computers to share information and reply to messages. By early 1980, they had created a network consisting of two computers at Duke and another at the University of North Carolina. Ellis had most recently been an Internet security consultant with Sun Microsystems.
