In 1979 Ellis and a fellow Duke graduate student, Tom Truscott, were inspired by ARPANet, the military's research network, and decided to use e-mail and university computers to establish what were, in effect, electronic bulletin boards.

Steve Bellovin, a University of North Carolina graduate student, wrote the first Newsnet program in three pages of the Unix Bourne shell language to transfer files over modem connections, using the Unix UUCP utility. The first connection was between the Computer Science Departments of Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Bellovin later rewrote the program in C.

Ellis was born in Nashville, Tenn., and grew up in Orlando, Fl. In college, he took a summer job as a tour guide at Disney World in Orlando. The constant talking with the public helped him overcome severe shyness.

At Duke, Ellis was a physics major, but spent all his free hours in the computer laboratory. "He was a great visionary of how the Net was to be used," said Tom Longstaff, a longtime friend and colleague. "His biggest accomplishments were always the interaction between technology and society."

When Ellis and Truscott conceived their system, ARPANet—the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network—was open only to government researchers and contractors.

Ellis, Truscott, Bellovin, and a fourth researcher, Stephen Daniel, ran their system by having their computers transfer data over phone lines in the evenings.

Ellis presented the full concept at a January 1980 Usenix conference in Boulder, Colo., where 80 copies of his paper were snatched up. He remembered later that the audience was particularly fascinated by his description of a home-made auto-dialer that moved data at the astonishing rate of 300 baud.

Truscott and Daniel rewrote the software, creating Netnews Version A. Since it was created for Unix at a university, it automatically became public domain. Duke invited other sites to join the network, and it spread across North America.

Carolyn Ellis, his wife, said, "Whoever was willing to call you at night and download all these messages was part of Usenet. They just sat back and gawked at how it grew."

Because the system was designed to allow average people to say whatever they wanted, all computers were equal on the system.

For some, though, the idea of shared information was discomforting. The FBI, which was interested in participating, had Usenet messages recorded on tape, then shipped to its computer system, instead of logging on.

The first three machines at Duke and UNC were eventually connected to others at Bell Labs, UC Berkeley, and Reed College in Portland, Ore.

After two years, a technician in Berkeley, Mark Horton, matter-of-factly connected the ARPANet system to Usenet, and the Internet was born.

None of the system's creators ever received any money from their creation.

Ellis moved to Pennsylvania to work for the Super Computing Center in Oakland, Penna., and later worked for CERT, the Computer Response Emergency Team.

Co-workers at CERT said Ellis played an important role in persuading manufacturers of anti-virus software to give away free updates on the Internet, rather than charge customers who had already purchased the product.

Most recently, he was telecommuting to a job at Sun Microsystems in California.