From: colin@hub.co.uk (Colin Renshaw, System Management, 2241)
Subject: Why do I have to test this?
Reply-To: colin@hub.co.uk
Organization: meiko
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 15:32:08 GMT

I never installed this.


---
Q: How many user support people does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We have an exact copy of the light bulb here and it seems to be
   working fine.  Can you tell me what kind of system you have?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                        The Florida SunFlash
              USENET Software: History and Sources
   
SunFLASH Vol 30 #3					           June 1991 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is an article that is posted periodically to the USENET newsgroup
news.announce.newusers. It is an excellent summary of the history of
the USENET software. This article also contains the names of archive
sites from which the latest vesrion of the USENET software can be
obtained.

For those of you unfamiliar with USENET here is a quick summary.
USENET is a worldwide, distributed bulletin board. There are over
1,000 (maybe over 1,500) different discussion groups ranging from
the highly technical to the highly dubious :-) !

-johnj
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: 	USENET Software: History and Sources
From: 		spaf@cs.purdue.EDU (Gene Spafford)
Newsgroups: 	news.admin,news.announce.newusers
Date: 		21 May 91 04:49:13 GMT
Organization: 	Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue Univ.

Original from: spaf@purdue (Gene Spafford)
[Most recent change: 18 May 1991 by eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)]


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.

History
-------
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 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 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 news is 2.11, patchlevel 19.  Article format is
specified in RFC 1036 (see below).

A new version of news, becoming known as "C" news, has been 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.

ANU-NEWS is news package written by Geoff Huston of Australia for VMS
systems.  ANU-NEWS is 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.  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.

An port of C-News for the Commodore Amiga under AmigaDOS (NOT Unix),
is available.  The port was done by Frank J. Edwards
<crash@ckctpa.uucp>, and available from Larry Rosenman
<ler@lerami.lonestar.org>.  Also, Matt Dillon
<dillon@overload.berkely.ca.us>, has greatly improved the UUCP clone
for AmigaDOS, currently V1.08D, also available for Rosenman.  The
package also includes a newsreader very loosely like the real rn.

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
now of JPL/NASA and released in 1984.  This interface also uses
full-screen display with direct positioning, but it includes many
other useful features and is very popular with many regular net
readers. The interface includes reading, discarding, and/or processing
of articles based on user-definable patterns, the ability to follow
"threads of discussions" in newsgroups, and the ability of the user to
develop customized macros for display and keyboard interaction.  "rn"
is currently at release 4.3, patchlevel 53, with a major re-release
under development; release 4.4 is expected at the end of January 1991.
"rn" is not provided with the standard news software release, but is
very widely available due to its popularity.

xrn is an X11-based interface to NNTP that was written by Rick
Spickelmier and Ellen Sentovich (UC Berkeley).  The current version is
6.9.  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).  xrn is actively supported by the authors with bug
fixing and feature addition support from many of the users.  xrn can
be retrieved from most of the popular FTP sites (gatekeeper.dec.com,
uunet.uu.net, expo.lcs.mit.edu) and is on the X11R4 distribution from
MIT (in the contrib section).

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.

"nn" is yet another reader interface, developed by Kim F. Storm of
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).  The
current version of nn is 6.4.11. nn can be obtained via anonymous FTP
from dkuug.dk, uop.uop.edu, mthvax.cs.miami.edu or various other
sites; European sites should request the sources from their nearest
backbone site. Other options can be found by reading news.software.nn.

"notes" is a software package popular at some sites.  It uses 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. The interface for "notes" is similar to "rn" but
implements different features, many of which are dictated by its
internal organization.  "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 current release of notes is
version 1.7. 

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
version of "rn" or other user agents) 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 Apollo
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.  It is now in
release 1.5.11 dated 11 february 1991, with the next planned release
at 1.6. NNTP includes support for System V UNIX with Excelan Ethernet
cards and DECNET under Ultrix.  NNTP was developed at U. C.  Berkeley
by Phil Lapsley with help from Erik Fair, Steven Grady, and Mike
Meyer, among others.  The NNTP package is distributed on the 4.3BSD
release tape (although that is version 1.2a and out-of-date) and is
also available from the various authors, many major hosts, and by
anonymous FTP from lib.tmc.edu, mthvax.cs.miami.edu and uunet.uu.net

Reader NNTP clients for VMS are also available, including VMS/VNEWS
(current release 1.3-4.1) and an upcoming reader only version of
ANU-NEWS. VMS/VNEWS is available from mcmahon@tgv.com.  Although the
current release of ANU-NEWS is useable as a reader it can be difficult
when used with a UNIX server.

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 apple.com and
sumex-aim.stanford.edu

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
<connolly@coins.cs.umass.edu> and maintained by Richard Welty
<welty@lewis.crd.ge.com>.  In addition, another NNTP-based news
browser is available running under Genera 7 and Genera 8.  It provides
mouse driven hierarchic browsing of newsgroups and articles, with
support for X11 servers on remote machines.  It is available for
anonymous FTP on flash.bellcore.com [128.96.32.20] in the directory
pub/lispm/news-reader/.  It is written and maintained by Peter
Clitherow <pc@bellcore.com>


A TOPS-20 reader was developed by Dave Edwards of SRI
<dle@kl.sri.com>, but current availability is unknown. An NNTP reader
suite for PC's running MS-DOS and having Excelan boards is available
for ftp from ames.arc.nasa.gov; get the pcrrn files.  There are two
MS-DOS news readers that can be obtained from bcm.tmc.edu in the "nfs"
directory. They both require PC-NFS (from Sun) to work. They will both
work under PC/TCP from FTP Software early this year. Source will be
provided at that time.

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.

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.

There are at least two NNTP news-readers for VM.  One requires IBM's
ISPF product.  Contact Satish Movva (u37127@uicvm.uic.edu) for
information.  The second uses XEDIT as its screen manager.  Contact
Paul Campbell (pc@mbunix.mitre.org) for information.  Both programs
require IBM's FAL TCP/IP and Pascal.

Special note on "notes" and pre-2.11 news
-----------------------------------------
Users of these systems may note problems in their interactions with the
Usenet.  In particular, postings may be made by "notes" users to
moderated groups but they will not usually propagate throughout the
entire Usenet.  The same may happen to users of old B news software.

Users of "notes" or old B news software wishing to post to moderated
groups should either mail their submissions to the moderator, as listed
in the monthly posting of "List of Moderators" in the group
"news.lists", or else they should post from a system running up-to-date
B news software (i.e., 2.11).  "notes" users may obtain some patches
from the comp.sources.unix archives which enable recent versions of
"notes" to interact with moderated groups properly.

Users of old B news and "notes" are also not able to take advantage of
some other current B news features, such as the "checkgroups" message.
"notes" continues to be a "foreign" system, and B news versions before
2.10.2 are considered "obsolete."  The various maintainers of the
Usenet software have never expressed any commitment to maintain
backwards compatibility with "foreign" or obsolete news systems and are
unlikely to do so;  it is the responsibility of the users to maintain
compatibility of such software if they wish to continue to interact
with the Usenet.


Software versions & availability
--------------------------------
You can obtain the version number of your news software by issuing the
"v" command in either "vnews" or "readnews."  "rn" version is
obtainable by typing the "v" command to the top level prompt -- it
should currently be 4.3.2.4.

Current software is obtainable from almost any major Usenet site.
Source to the 'rn' newsreader program is also widely available.

The following sites have sources to the current news software available
for anyone needing a copy:

		Site		Contact
		----		-------
		munnari		kre@munnari.oz.au
		osu-cis		postmaster@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
		philabs		usenet@philabs.philips.com
		pyramid		usenet@pyramid.com
		rutgers		usenet@rutgers.edu
		tektronix	news@tektronix.tek.com
		watmath		usenet@watmath.waterloo.edu

Sources for both news 2.11 and "rn" are also available in the
comp.sources.unix archives.  European sites should request the sources
from their nearest Eunet backbone site.

Standards
---------
News programs communicate with each other according to standard protocols,
some of which are described by RFCs.  An RFC is a Request For Comment, a
de facto standard in the Internet Community.  It is a form of published
software standard, done through the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI.
Copies of RFCs are often posted to the net and obtainable from archive sites.
Current news-related RFCs include the following:

    RFC 822	 specifies the format of messages; RFC 1036 uses this.
    RFC 977	 specifies NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol.
    RFC 1036	 specifies the format of Usenet articles.
    RFC 1123	 amends RFC 822.
    RFC 1153	 specifies the digest format some moderated groups use.

Acknowledgements
----------------
The preparation of this article (and Usenet itself!) was greatly
enhanced by the contributions and assistance of the following persons:
Steve Bellovin, Ray Essick, Mark Horton, Brian Kantor, Phil Lapsley,
Bob Page, Tom Truscott, and Larry Wall.  Thanks, folks.

-- 
Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-1398
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	phone:  (317) 494-7825


Newsgroups: alt.test