B News
Encyclopedia
| B2.9 and earlier | | B2.10 | | B2.11 |
|---|---|---|
| From (as UUCP path) |
Path | |
| (not used) | From (as Internet mail address) |
|
| Article-I.D. | Message-ID | |
| Title | Subject | |
| Posted | Date | |
| Received | (not used) | |
| (not used) | Relay-Version | (not used) |
| (not used) | Posting-Version | (not used) |
| (not used) | Approved | |
B News was a Usenet
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...
news server
News server
A news server is a set of computer software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. A reader server provides an interface to read and post articles, generally with the assistance of a news client. A transit...
developed at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
by Matt Glickman and Mark Horton
Mary Ann Horton
Mary Ann Horton, formerly Mark R. Horton , is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX , including the vi editor and terminfo database, and led the growth of Usenet in the 1980s....
as a replacement for A News
A News
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...
. It was used on 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...
systems from 1981 into the 1990s and is the reference implementation
Reference implementation
In the software development process, a reference implementation is the standard from which all other implementations, with their attendant customizations, are measured, and to which all improvements are added...
for the de facto Usenet standard described in IETF
Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...
RFC 850 and RFC 1036. Releases from 2.10.2 were maintained by UUNET
UUNET
UUNET founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the nine Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was the first commercial Internet service provider...
founder Rick Adams
Rick Adams (Internet pioneer)
Richard L. Adams, Jr. was an Internet pioneer and the founder of UUNET, which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the world's largest Internet Service Provider ....
.
B News introduced numerous changes from its predecessor. Articles used an extensible format with named headers, first by using labeled equivalents to the A News format. A further refinement in 1983 with News B2.10 was a move to 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...
-compatible headers, to ease message transfers with the 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...
. A history database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
was introduced, allowing articles to be placed in separate directories by newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
, improving retrieval speeds and easing the development of separate newsreader
News client
A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet . Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol , to download articles and post new articles...
programs such as rn
Rn (newsreader)
rn is a news client written by Larry Wall and originally released in 1984. It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of character-addressable CRT terminals...
. Support was provided for expiring old articles, and control messages (special articles that can automatically cause articles to be erased, or newsgroups to be added or removed) were added.
News B2.10 introduced the hierarchical article storage format carried into C News
C News
C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C....
and InterNetNews, and still commonly seen in many newsreaders and cache programs. Before B2.10, all groups were stored beneath a single parent directory, impairing performance when the group list became large, and requiring that the first 14 characters be unique among all groups due to an old Unix limitation. The hierarchical layout split the groups at the periods, reducing directory sizes and ameliorating the uniqueness problem.
B2.10 contained limited support for moderated newsgroups, with posters needing to manually mail in submissions to an intermediate party who would post articles on their behalf. Moderated groups needed to be prefixed with "mod." In 1986, version B2.11 allowed moderated newsgroups to appear in any hierarchy, and it transparently mailed out moderated group submissions using the normal posting software.
The last B News patch set was released in 1989, after which Rick Adams
Rick Adams (Internet pioneer)
Richard L. Adams, Jr. was an Internet pioneer and the founder of UUNET, which, in the mid and late 1990s, was the world's largest Internet Service Provider ....
declared the product obsolete.
About 1989, Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement...
attempted a rewrite of B News, known alternately as Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews and News 3.0. A rough version of the software was released and drew attention from around the network, but the project was abandoned shortly thereafter.
External links
- [ftp://ftp.uu.net/networking/news/bnews-2.11 B2.11 News source and patches]
- Discussion of TMNN from Google Groups
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews source code