Chapter 20. Netnews
Netnews, or Usenet news, remains one of the most important and highly valued services on computer networks today. Dismissed by some as a mire of unsolicited commercial email and pornography, Netnews still maintains several cases of the high-quality discussion groups that made it a critical resource in pre-web days. Even in these times of a billion web pages, Netnews is still a source for online help and community on many topics.
Usenet History
The idea of network news was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of using UUCP to connect machines for information exchange among Unix users. They set up a small network of three machines in North Carolina.
Initially, traffic was handled by a number of shell scripts (later rewritten in C), but they were never released to the public. They were quickly replaced by “A News,” the first public release of news software.
A News was not designed to handle more than a few articles per group and day. When the volume continued to grow, it was rewritten by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman, who called it the “B” release (a.k.a. B News). The first public release of B News was version 2.1 in 1982. It was expanded continuously, with several new features added. Its current version is B News 2.11. It is slowly becoming obsolete; its last official maintainer switched to INN.
Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer rewrote B News and released it in 1987; this is release “C,” or C News. Since its release, there ...
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