86 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
86 lines
3.8 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
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<!--Converted with LaTeX2HTML 96.1-c (Feb 29, 1996) by Nikos Drakos (nikos@cbl.leeds.ac.uk), CBLU, University of Leeds -->
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<HTML>
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<HEAD>
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<TITLE>Usenet History</TITLE>
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</HEAD>
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<BODY LANG="EN">
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<A HREF="node1.html"><IMG WIDTH=65 HEIGHT=24 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="contents" SRC="contents_motif.gif"></A> <BR>
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<B> Next:</B> <A HREF="node257.html">What is Usenet Anyway?</A>
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<B>Up:</B> <A HREF="node255.html">Netnews</A>
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<B> Previous:</B> <A HREF="node255.html">Netnews</A>
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<BR> <P>
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<H1><A NAME="SECTION0018100000">Usenet History</A></H1>
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The idea of network news was born in 1979 when two graduate students, Tom
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Truscott and Jim Ellis, thought of using UUCP to connect machines for the
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purpose of information exchange among users. They set up
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a small network of three machines in North Carolina.
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<P>
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Initially, traffic was handled by a number of shell scripts (later
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rewritten in C), but they were never released to the public. They
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were quickly replaced by ``A'' news, the first public release of news
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software.
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<P>
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``A'' news was not designed to handle more than a few articles
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per group and day. When the volume continued to grow, it was rewritten
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by Mark Horton and Matt Glickman, who called it the ``B'' release
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(a.k.a. Bnews). The first public release of Bnews was version-2.1
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in 1982. It was expanded continuously, with several new features
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being added. Its current version is Bnews-2.11. It is slowly
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becoming obsolete, with its last official maintainer having switched to
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INN.
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<P>
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<A NAME="8492"></A>
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<A NAME="8493"></A>
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<A NAME="8545"></A>
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<A NAME="8495"></A>
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Another rewrite was done and released in 1987 by Geoff Collyer and Henry
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Spencer; this is release ``C'', or C-News. In the time following there
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have been a number of patches to C-News, the most prominent being the
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C-News Performance Release. On sites that carry a large number of groups,
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the overhead involved in frequently invoking relaynews, which is
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responsible for dispatching incoming articles to other hosts, is
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significant. The Performance Release adds an option to relaynews
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that allows to run it in <em>daemon mode</em>, in which the program puts
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itself in the background.
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<P>
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The Performance Release is the C-News version currently included in most
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releases.
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<P>
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<A NAME="8546"></A>
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<A NAME="8501"></A>
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All news releases up to ``C'' are primarily targeted for UUCP networks,
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although they may be used in other environments as well. Efficient news
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transfer over networks like TCP/IP, DECNet, or related requires a new
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scheme. This was the reason why, in 1986, the ``Network News Transfer
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Protocol'', NNTP, was introduced. It is based on network connections,
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and specifies a number of commands to interactively transfer and
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retrieve articles.
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<P>
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There are a number of NNTP-based applications available from
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the Net. One of them is the nntpd package by Brian Barber
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and Phil Lapsley, which you can use, among other things, to
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provides newsreading service to a number of hosts inside a local
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network. nntpd was designed to complement news packages such as
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Bnews or C-News to give them NNTP features.
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<P>
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<A NAME="8504"></A>
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<A NAME="8505"></A>
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A different NNTP package is INN, or Internet News. It is not merely
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a front end, but a news system by its own right. It comprises a
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sophisticated news relay daemon that is capable of maintaining
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several concurrent NNTP links efficiently, and is therefore the
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news server of choice for many Internet sites.
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<P>
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<HR><A HREF="node1.html"><IMG WIDTH=65 HEIGHT=24 ALIGN=BOTTOM ALT="contents" SRC="contents_motif.gif"></A> <BR>
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<B> Next:</B> <A HREF="node257.html">What is Usenet Anyway?</A>
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<B>Up:</B> <A HREF="node255.html">Netnews</A>
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<B> Previous:</B> <A HREF="node255.html">Netnews</A>
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<P><ADDRESS>
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<I>Andrew Anderson <BR>
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Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996</I>
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</ADDRESS>
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</BODY>
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</HTML>
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