Usenet and Usenet Software FAQ [1 of 2 parts]
Path: news.compuserve.com!news.compuserve.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!in2.uu.net!deshaw.com!do-not-use-path-to-reply Currently, Usenet readers interact with the news using a number of
software packages and programs. This article mentions the important
ones and a little of their history, gives pointers where you can look
for more information and ends with some special notes about "foreign"
and "obsolete" software. At the very end is a list of sites from which
current versions of the Usenet software may be obtained.
Note that the number of software packages available to run news,
especially on PCs, is increasing. This article lists only a few of
the many news packages available, and the presence or absence of any
particular software package should not be construed as indicating
anything about its suitability usefulness.
The material contained in this post is probably not 100% up-to-date.
Many of the software packages described in this posting are undergoing
constant development, and it is not always possible to know when new
releases have been made. Should you discover that information in this
post has been superseded by a new release, please send mail to the poster
of this article with the corrected information.
While the "official" ftp archive sites for packages are listed, note that
most large archive sites carry news software; please try the one nearest
to you before you use up expensive bandwidth on a trans-continental
network link. You can check the official site for the current version
number, if you want to make sure you're getting the latest version. In
general, a good place to get recent versions of the more popular news
transport and reading software by anonymous ftp is
ftp.uu.net:/networking/news/ directory.
Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after the release of V7
Unix with UUCP. Two Duke University grad students in North Carolina,
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of hooking computers together to
exchange information with the Unix community. Steve Bellovin, a grad
student at the University of North Carolina, put together the first
version of the news software using shell scripts and installed it on
the first two sites: "unc" and "duke." At the beginning of 1980 the
network consisted of those two sites and "phs" (another machine at
Duke), and was described at the January Usenix conference. Steve
Bellovin later rewrote the scripts into C programs, but they were never
released beyond "unc" and "duke." Shortly thereafter, Steve Daniel did
another implementation in C for public distribution. Tom Truscott made
further modifications, and this became the "A" news release.
In 1981 at U. C. Berkeley, grad student Mark Horton and high school
student Matt Glickman rewrote the news software to add functionality
and to cope with the ever increasing volume of news -- "A" News was
intended for only a few articles per group per day. This rewrite was
the "B" News version. The first public release was version 2.1 in
1982; the 1.* versions were all beta test. As the net grew, the news
software was expanded and modified. The last version maintained and
released primarily by Mark was 2.10.1.
Rick Adams, at the Center for Seismic Studies, took over coordination
of the maintenance and enhancement of the B News software with the
2.10.2 release in 1984. By this time, the increasing volume of news
was becoming a concern, and the mechanism for moderated groups was
added to the software at 2.10.2. Moderated groups were inspired by
ARPA mailing lists and experience with other bulletin board systems.
In late 1986, version 2.11 of B News was released, including a number
of changes to support a new naming structure for newsgroups, enhanced
batching and compression, enhanced ihave/sendme control messages, and
other features.
The current release of B News is 2.11, patchlevel 19. Article format is
specified in RFC 1036 (see below). B News has been declared "dead" by a
number of people, including Rick Adams, and is unlikely to be upgraded
further; most new UUCP sites are using C News or INN (see next
paragraphs).
In March 1986 a package was released implementing news transmission,
posting, and reading using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
(as specified in RFC 977). This protocol allows hosts to exchange
articles via TCP/IP connections rather than using the traditional
uucp. It also permits users to read and post news (using a modified
news user agent) from machines which cannot or choose not to install
the Usenet news software. Reading and posting are done using TCP/IP
messages to a server host which does run the Usenet software. Sites
which have many workstations like the Sun and SGI, and HP products
find this a convenient way to allow workstation users to read news
without having to store articles on each system. Many of the Usenet
hosts that are also on the Internet exchange news articles using NNTP
because the load impact of NNTP is much lower than uucp (and NNTP
ensures much faster propagation).
NNTP grew out of independent work in 1984-1985 by Brian Kantor at U. C.
San Diego and Phil Lapsley at U. C. Berkeley. Primary development was
done at U. C. Berkeley by by Phil Lapsley with help from Erik Fair,
Steven Grady, and Mike Meyer, among others. The NNTP package (now called
the reference implementation) was distributed on the 4.3BSD release tape
(although that was version 1.2a and out-of-date) and is also available on
many major hosts by anonymous FTP. The current version is 1.5.12.1. It
includes NOV support and runs on a wide variety of systems. It is
available from ftp.academ.com:/pub/nntp1.5/nntp.1.5.12.1.tar.Z. For
those with access to the World-Wide Web on the Internet, the WWW page
http://www.academ.com/academ/nntp.html contains a description and news
about NNTP. A different variant, called nntp-t5, implements many of the
extensions provided by INN (most notably News Overview NOV support -- see
below). It is available from:
Another Usenet system, known as InterNetNews, or INN, was written by Rich
Salz Towards the end of 1992, Geoff Collyer implemented NOV (News Overview): a
database that stores the important headers of all news articles as they
arrive. This is intended for use by the implementors of news readers to
provide fast article presentation by sorting and "threading" the article
headers. (Before NOV, newsreaders like trn, tin and nn came with their
own daemons and databases that used a nontrivial amount of system
resources). NOV is fully supported by C News, INN and NNTP-t5. Most
modern news readers use NOV to get information for their threading and
article menu presentation; use of NOV by a newsreader is fairly easy,
since NOV comes with sample client-side threading code.
ANU-NEWS is news package written by Geoff Huston of Australia for VMS
systems. ANU-NEWS is a complete news system that allows reading,
posting, direct replies, moderated newsgroups, etc. in a fashion
closely related to regular news. The implementation includes the RFC
1036 news propagation algorithms and integrated use of the NNTP
protocols (see below) to support remote news servers, implemented as a
VAX/VMS Decnet object. An RFC 977 server implemented as a Decnet
object is also included. ANU-NEWS currently includes support for the
following TCP/IP protocols: MultiNet, CMU/TEK, Wollongong WIN/TCP, UCX
(TCP/IP Services for OpenVMS), EXOS, and TCPware. The ANU-NEWS
interface is similar to standard DEC screen oriented systems. The
license for the software is free, and there are no restrictions on the
re-distribution. For more info, contact gih900@fac.anu.oz.au (Geoff
Huston). ANU-NEWS is available for FTP from kuhub.cc.ukans.edu.
Contact SLOANE@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU for more info.
A screen-oriented news client for VMS that works with CMU/tek, EXOS,
MultiNet, UCX, Wollongong and DECnet is also available via ftp from
iraun1.ira.uka.de, info.rz.uni-ulm.de, and ftp.spc.edu (contact Bernd
Onasch Reader NNTP clients for VMS are also available, including VMS/VNEWS
(current release 1.4) and an upcoming reader only version of ANU-NEWS.
VMS/VNEWS is available via anonymous ftp from arizona.edu (contact
jms@arizona.edu for more information) or at any site which archives
vmsnet.source. Although the current release of ANU-NEWS is usable as
a reader it can be difficult when used with a UNIX server.
FNEWS is a fast news reader, for VAX/VMS and UNIX. It is basically a
mixture of NEWSRDR and ANU-NEWS, (a bit like 'nn' in how it works) giving
a nice (but different) full-screen interface and fast response to all
3000 groups without heavily loading your local machine. It works by
caching the news indexes from a UNIX news system (CNEWS or INN), and then
dynamically loading the items when the user wants to read them. Indexes
are only cached for groups which are actually read, so the load and disk
usage can be very small. FNEWS Versions are available for VMS, ALPHA-VMS
and UNIX via anonymous ftp from grunt.marc.cri.nz in pub/fnews. Contact
chrisp@marc.cri.nz for more information.
A port of C News for the Commodore Amiga under AmigaDOS (NOT Unix), is
available. The port was done by Frank J. Edwards Several popular screen-oriented news reading interfaces have been
developed in the last few years to replace the traditional "readnews"
interface. The first of these was "vnews" and it was written by
Kenneth Almquist. "vnews" provides a "readnews"-like command
interface, but displays articles using direct screen positioning. It
appears to have been inspired, to some extent, by the "notes" system
(described below). "vnews" is currently distributed with the standard
2.11 news source.
A second, more versatile interface, "rn", was developed by Larry Wall (the
author of Perl) and released in 1984. This interface also uses full-screen
display with direct positioning, but it includes many other useful features
and has been very popular with many regular net readers. The interface
includes reading, discarding, and/or processing of articles based on
user-definable patterns, and the ability of the user to develop customized
macros for display and keyboard interaction. "rn" is currently at release
4.4.4. It is being maintained by Stan Barber Wayne Davison's "trn" is a superset of "rn". Trn adds the ability to
follow "threads of discussions" in newsgroups; its latest version 3.6 is
based on rn 4.4. It uses a Reference-line database to allow the user to
take advantage of the "discussion tree" formed by an article and its
replies. This results in a true reply-ordered reading of the articles,
complete with a small ascii representation of the current article's
position in the discussion tree. Trn is also capable of "menu-based"
selection of articles, allows one to do useful things to operate on a set
of selected newsgroups. Trn can be obtained from ftp.uu.net in the
/networking/news/readers/trn directory, and from many other archive
servers world-wide.
xrn is an X11-based interface to NNTP that was written by Rick Spickelmier
and Ellen Sentovich (UC Berkeley) and is currently maintained by Jonathan
Kamens (OpenVision Technologies, Inc.). The current version is 7.00,
available by anonymous ftp from ftp.x.org in /contrib/applications/xrn. xrn
supports many features, including sorting by subject, user-settable key
bindings, graceful handling of NNTP server crashes, and many of the features
of rn (including KILL files and key bindings similar to rn).
Another X11-based newsreader is xvnews, written by Dan Currie, currently
maintained by Hans de Graaff There are two popular macro packages named "GNUS" and "Gnews" that can
be used with the GNU Emacs text editor. These allow reading,
replying, and posting interaction with the news from inside the Emacs
text editor. Client code exists to get the articles using NNTP rather
than from a local disk. Copies can be found on most archive sites
that carry the GNU archives eg. ftp.cs.titech.ac.jp, archie.au,
archive.eu.net, gatekeeper.dec.com, prep.ai.mit.edu.
"nn" is yet another reader interface, developed by Kim F. Storm of Texas
Instruments A/S, Denmark, and released in 1989. nn differs from the
traditional readnews and vnews by presenting a menu of article subject
and sender-name lines, allowing you to preselect articles to read. nn is
also a very fast newsreader, as it keeps a database of article headers
on-line. (I.e. it trades space for time. A good rule of thumb is that
the nn database size is 5%-10% of your news spool. So up to 110% of your
news spool is the amount of space news and the nn database will take.)
nn is now maintained by Peter Wemm Yet another newsreader is the "tin" reader. It operates with threads, uses
NOV-style index files if available, has different article organization
methods, and is full-screen oriented. tin works on a local news spool or
over an NNTP connection. It has been posted to alt.sources; further
information is available from Iain Lea (iain.lea@erlm.siemens.de). The
current release of tin is 1.22. Tin is based more on the Notes and tass
systems than "rn". There is an extensive list of features, including
interfaces to batch modes and auto unpacking mechanisms. The official ftp
site for tin is ftp.germany.eu.net, the Unix version can be found in
/pub/news/newsreader/unix/tin and the OS/2 version in
/pub/news/newsreader/os2/tin
Pine(tm) --a Program for Internet News & Email-- is a tool for reading,
sending, and managing electronic messages. It was designed specifically
with novice computer users in mind, but can be tailored to accommodate the
needs of "power users" as well. Pine uses Internet news and mail message
protocols and runs on Unix and PCs. Pine is copyrighted, but freely
available. The latest version, including source code, can be found on
the Internet host "ftp.cac.washington.edu" in the file "pine/pine.tar.Z"
(accessible via anonymous FTP). To try Pine out from the Internet, you
may telnet to "demo.cac.washington.edu" and login as "pinedemo". There
is also a Pine-specific Internet news group (comp.mail.pine). For
further information, send e-mail to pine@cac.washington.edu. Pine was
originally based on Elm, but there is little if any Elm code left. Pine
is the work of Mike Seibel, Steve Hubert, Mark Crispin, Sheryl Erez,
David Miller and Laurence Lundblade* at the University of Washington
Office of Computing and Communications. Pine and Pico are trademarks of
the University of Washington. (* Laurence is now at Virginia Tech.)
An NNTP newsreader for Macintoshs is available called HyperNews. It is
implemented as a HyperCard stack and depends on MacTCP. It is available
from many Mac archives, including ftp.apple.com and
sumex-aim.stanford.edu.
A newsreader preferred by many Macintosh users is NewsWatcher by by
j-norstad@nwu.edu (John Norstad). The current version is 2.0b8 and is
available in ftp.acns.nwu.edu:/pub/newswatcher.
Nuntius is another newsreader for the Mac, written by Peter Speck
There is also an NNTP-based netnews reader for Symbolics Lisp Machines
(under Genera 7) available for anonymous FTP from ucbvax.berkeley.edu
[128.32.133.1] in pub/nntp-clients/lispm written by Ian Connolly
A TOPS-20 reader was developed by Dave Edwards of SRI
"trumpet" is a NNTP based news reader for DOS and Windows. There is Lan
Workplace version which is also available. It runs over packet drivers,
which can work side-by-side with a Novell Network. For information on
the Crynwr Packet Driver Collection, send mail to "WinVN" is a public domain NNTP newsreader for Microsoft Windows and
Windows NT. There are versions available for WINSOCK, Novell LWP, and
DEC Pathworks/LanMan. It supports the XOVER extension, and can display
articles in thread trees. SMTP and MAPI outgoing mail are supported.
The latest version is 0.99.2. Sources and binaries are always available
from:
Details on several newsreaders for systems running "Waffle" may be
found in the FAQ posted to the comp.bbs.waffle newsgroup on a regular
basis. At least 8 different readers are available, and all can be
obtained via ftp and mailserver from ftp.halcyon.com (look in
/pub/waffle/news).
Details on many other mail and news readers for MSDOS, Windows and OS/2
systems can be found in the FAQ posted to the comp.os.msdos.mail-news.
At least one IBM VM/SP (CMS) version of the Usenet software is
available. It is known as PSU NetNews, and it is maintained by Linda
Littleton (lrl@psuvm.bitnet/psuvm.psu.edu). Version 2.4 of the
software is available from LISTSERV@PSUVM. PSU NetNews supports only
3270 terminals, and uses XEDIT as its screen driver. Most major VM
sites appear to use this package. NetNews supports locally-stored
news, not NNTP reading.
Since January 1993, a complete NNTP server is available for VM systems.
It provides news reading, posting and feed processing compatible to the
Unix NNTP implementations. The code is written in IBM's VM Rexx.
It assumes that you already have installed PSU VM NETNEWS. The VM NNTP
package, written by Kris Van Hees (gutest6@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be) who also
takes care of the maintenance. The current version is 1.0.1 and requires
IBM's FAL TCP/IP and Arty Ecock's RXSOCKET which is available from the
IBMTCP FIELLIST on listserv@pucc. The VM NNTP package can be obtained
from the NNTP PACKAGE on listserv@blekul11.
There is NNTP support for PSU NetNews for bulk news receipt: NNTPXFER
will poll another site for news, and NNTPRCVR will receive news sent
from a Unix NNTPXMIT process. Either program sends the news articles
to NetNews for processing. Contact Andy Hooper (hooper@qucdn.bitnet
or qucdn.queensu.ca) for more information, or obtain them from
listserv@qucdn in PUBLIC FILELIST. These programs are provided with
source, and require IBM's FAL TCP/IP and Pascal. An NNTPXMIT sender
that works in cooperation with PSU NETNEWS is available from Herman
Van Uytven (SYSTHVU@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be).
There is at least one NNTP news-reader for VM using XEDIT as its
screen manager: NNR. Contact Paul Campbell (pc@mbunix.mitre.org) for
information. The program requires IBM's FAL TCP/IP. The software is
available for anonymous ftp from ftp.uni-stuttgart.de
in the directory pub/comm/news/beginner/software/nnr/*.
An NNTP news reader is available for TSO/ISPF, called NNMVS. NNMVS is
written by Steve Bacher Gup, the Group Update Program is a Unix mail-server program that lets a
remote site change their newsgroups subscription on their news feed
without requiring the intervention of the news administrator at the feed
site. Gup operates with the INN (and likely the C News) batching
mechanisms. The news administrators at the remote sites simply mail
commands to gup to make changes to their own site's subscription list.
The mail/interface is password protected. Gup checks the requests for
valid newsgroup names, patterns that have no effect and so on. Gup's
authors are Mark Delany dynafeed is a package from Looking Glass Software Limited that maintains a
..newsrc for every remote site and generates the batches for them. Remote
sites can use uucp or run a program to change their .newsrc dynamically. It
comes with a program that the remote site can run to monitor readership in
newsgroups and dynamically update the feed list to match reader interest.
The goal of this is to get a feed that sends only exactly the groups
currently being read. dynafeed can be obtained from ftp.clarinet.com as
sources/dynafeed.tar.Z.
Software also exists to automatically archive Usenet newsgroups. The package
rkive, written by Kent Landfield Newsclip is a programming language for writing news filtering programs, from
Looking Glass Software Limited, marketed by ClariNet Communications Corp. It
is C-like, and translates to C, so a C compiler is required. It has
data-types to represent the kinds of things found in article headers and
bodies. It can maintain databases of users, message-ids, patterns,
subjects, etc. These can be used to decide whether to ignore or select an
article. Newsclip can either operate as a standalone program or as part of
rn. It is free for non-commercial use and is available from ftp.clarinet.com
as sources/nc.tar.Z. Contact clari-info@clarinet.com with
a subject line of "newsclip" for more info.
Many years ago, there was another distributed "news" system called
"notes". The "notes" software package used a different internal
organization of articles, and a different interchange format than that
of the standard Usenet software. It was inspired by the notesfiles
available in the PLATO system and was developed independently from the
Usenet news. Eventually, the "notes" network and Usenet were joined
via gateways doing (sometimes imperfect) protocol translation.
"notes" was written in 1980-1981 by Ray Essick and Rob Kolstad, (then)
grad students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The
first public release of "notes" was at the January 1982 Usenix
conference. The last release of notes was version 1.7; it is no
longer being actively maintained and the newsgroup for discussing
it (news.software.notes) was removed in April 1995.
"B" news software is currently considered obsolete. Unix sites
joining the Usenet should install C news or INN to ensure proper
behavior and good performance. Most old B news software had
compiled-in limits on the number of newsgroups and the number of
articles per newsgroup; the increasing volume of news means that B
news software cannot reliably cope with a moderately-full newsfeed.
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 08:01:08 GMT
Supersedes:
Expires: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 08:01:08 GMT
Message-ID:
From: netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
Subject: Usenet Software: History and Sources
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.announce.newusers,news.software.readers,news.software.b,news.answers
Followup-To: news.admin.misc
Approved: netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
Lines: 608
Xref: news.compuserve.com news.admin.misc:43242 news.announce.newusers:1919 news.software.readers:22063 news.software.b:18701 news.answers:49933
Status: N
Archive-name: usenet/software/part1
Original-from: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Comment: edited until 5/93 by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Last-change: 11 Sep 1995 by netannounce@deshaw.com (Mark Moraes)
Changes-posted-to: news.admin.misc,news.misc,news.software.readers,news.software.b,news.answers
History
ftp.uu.net:/networking/news/nntp/nntp-t5.tar.gz.
One new version of news, known as C News, was developed at the University
of Toronto by Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer. This version is a rewrite
of the lowest levels of news to increase article processing speed,
decrease article expiration processing and improve the reliability of the
news system through better locking, etc. The package was released to the
net in the autumn of 1987. For more information, see the paper "News Need
Not Be Slow," published in The Winter 1987 Usenix Technical Conference
proceedings. This paper is also available from ftp.cs.toronto.edu in
doc/programming/c-news.*, and is recommended reading for all news software
programmers. The most recent version of C News is the Sept 1994 "Cleanup
Release." C News can be obtained by anonymous ftp from its official
archive site,
ftp.cs.toronto.edu:pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z.
http://www.academ.com/academ/rn.html.
ftp.twi.tudelft.nl in the /pub/news directory.
trumpet ftp.trumpet.com.au:/trumpet/
wintrumpet ftp.trumpet.com.au:/wintrump/
ftp.ksc.nasa.gov:[.pub.win3.winvn].
ripem.msu.edu:/pub/pc/win/winvn/titan.ksc.nasa.gov (mirror).
Newsfeed management software
News processing software
Special note on "notes" and old versions of news
