1986

The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is developed in February 1986 to enable the transmission of USENET messages via TCP/IP.
USENET was developed by Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin and Jim Ellis in 1979 and it was used to link two UNIX computers of the University of North Carolina and Duke University.
Steve Bellovin

Files could be transmitted across conventional telephone lines, using the UNIX protocol UUCP (UNIX To UNIX Copy). Soon more computers joined the network, but due to the UUCP protocols the network was limited to UNIX machines. UUCP enabled the exchange of private messages on the USENET as well as taking part in public forums.To get a general idea of the available newsgroups, they were classified hierarchically in seven principle topics. Due to the technical structure of USENET those seven hierarchies were the only ones on USENET for quite a long time. Although the network had grown to some thousand computers, most of the network traffic ran across central computers, whose administrators had quite a lot of influence on the creation of new groups.
This changed with the release of NNTP. This protocol was developed for the operation on TCP/IP- circuits. Now file transmission across the internet was possible which decentralized USENET.