A News
Encyclopedia
A News, originally known simply as "news," was the first widely distributed program for serving and reading Usenet
newsgroups. The program, written at Duke University
by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott
, was released on a tape given out at the June 1980 USENIX
conference held at the University of Delaware
. Steve Daniel from Duke offered a presentation on the then-new Usenet network and invited attendees to join.
The Seventh Edition of Unix
included a "message of the day
" facility, which allowed the system operator to cause messages to be displayed to the user at login. A News (so called because each message began with "A" as a marker character) was an expansion of this facility that allowed news messages to be distributred across an arbitrary number of systems using the new uucp
service.
In addition to the login display, news articles could be read at any time from the command line. A user could also post new messages to the local machine (by posting to a special default newsgroup called "general") or queue it for network-wide transmission by placing it in a public group such as "NET.general".
The software was designed primarily for announcements, so the interface was extremely simple. There were no provisions built in for replying to articles over news (e-mail
replies were supported), skipping over messages, or threading. Because the system was designed only with uucp in mind, posters were identified by their uucp "bang path" addresses, a feature that persists (albeit more for identifying servers than users) in modern Usenet. ARPAnet
addressing was not supported.
The message format was designed for compactness rather than flexibility, consistent with the slow dialup modem
s used in 1980. The initial "A" dictated the layout of header and message information, and expansions would require changing the initial character. This scheme was abandoned after A news for the more verbose but expandable format seen .
Because Usenet grew rapidly, the limited capabilities and simplistic article storage scheme (all articles were placed in a single disk directory and there was no facility for expiring old articles) quickly made A News impractical to use. It was largely superseded by B News
, although some organizations continued to use it for internal communications for many years. Later modifications did add the ability to process the early B News article format and act on B News control articles.
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
newsgroups. The program, written at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
by Steve Daniel and Tom Truscott
Tom Truscott
Tom Truscott is a computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University. He is also a member of ACM, IEEE, and Sigma Xi. One of his the first endeavors into computers were writing a computer chess program and then later working on a...
, was released on a tape given out at the June 1980 USENIX
USENIX
-External links:* *...
conference held at the University of Delaware
University of Delaware
The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...
. Steve Daniel from Duke offered a presentation on the then-new Usenet network and invited attendees to join.
The Seventh Edition of Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
included a "message of the day
MOTD
MOTD may refer to either one of these things:* Match of the Day, the BBC's main football television programme* motd , "Message of the Day" , a regularly updated message often forming part of a computer program...
" facility, which allowed the system operator to cause messages to be displayed to the user at login. A News (so called because each message began with "A" as a marker character) was an expansion of this facility that allowed news messages to be distributred across an arbitrary number of systems using the new uucp
UUCP
UUCP is an abbreviation for Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers. Specifically, a command named uucp is one of the programs in the suite; it...
service.
In addition to the login display, news articles could be read at any time from the command line. A user could also post new messages to the local machine (by posting to a special default newsgroup called "general") or queue it for network-wide transmission by placing it in a public group such as "NET.general".
The software was designed primarily for announcements, so the interface was extremely simple. There were no provisions built in for replying to articles over news (e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
replies were supported), skipping over messages, or threading. Because the system was designed only with uucp in mind, posters were identified by their uucp "bang path" addresses, a feature that persists (albeit more for identifying servers than users) in modern Usenet. ARPAnet
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
addressing was not supported.
The message format was designed for compactness rather than flexibility, consistent with the slow dialup modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s used in 1980. The initial "A" dictated the layout of header and message information, and expansions would require changing the initial character. This scheme was abandoned after A news for the more verbose but expandable format seen .
Because Usenet grew rapidly, the limited capabilities and simplistic article storage scheme (all articles were placed in a single disk directory and there was no facility for expiring old articles) quickly made A News impractical to use. It was largely superseded by B News
B News
B News was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton as a replacement for A News. It was used on Unix systems from 1981 into the 1990s and is the reference implementation for the de facto Usenet standard described in IETF RFC 850 and...
, although some organizations continued to use it for internal communications for many years. Later modifications did add the ability to process the early B News article format and act on B News control articles.