C News is a 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...

 package, written by Geoff Collyer

Geoff Collyer

Geoff Collyer is a Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of C News, a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview database used by all modern newsreaders....

, assisted by Henry Spencer

Henry Spencer

Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely-used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also authored The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book...

, at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

 as a replacement for 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...

. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX

USENIX

-External links:* *...

 conference in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....

Functionally, the operation of C News is very much like that of B News. One major difference was that C News was written with portability

Porting

In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

 in mind. It ran on many variants 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...

 and even MS-DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

. The relaynews program that handled article filing and feeding was carefully optimized and designed to process articles in batches, while B News processed one article per program invocation. The authors claimed that relaynews could process articles 19 times as quickly as B News.

In 1992, Collyer gave C News a new index facility called NOV (or News Overview). This allowed newsreaders to rapidly retrieve header and threading information with relatively little load on the server. Virtually all news servers continue to use this method in the form of the NNTP

Network News Transfer Protocol

The Network News Transfer Protocol is an Internet application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles between news servers and for reading and posting articles by end user client applications...

 XOVER command. Development of C News stopped about 1995, and the package was largely superseded by INN.

External links

• Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer (1987). [ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/doc/programming/c-news.ps News Need Not Be Slow].
• Mark Linimon (1994). C News Frequently Asked Questions.
• [ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z C News source code]