A News, or Netnews Version A, originally known simply as news, was the first widely distributed program for serving and reading

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

newsgroups A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinc ...

. The program, written at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

by Steve Daniel and

Tom Truscott Tom Truscott is an American 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 first endeavors into computers was ...

, was released on a tape given out at the June 1980 USENIX conference held at the

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially UD or Delaware) is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. UD is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate's programs, 148 bachelor's programs, 121 mas ...

. Steve Daniel from Duke offered a presentation on the then-new Usenet network and invited attendees to join.

Seventh Edition Unix Seventh Edition Unix, also called Version 7 Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercial ...

included a "

message of the day Many computer systems display a message of the day or welcome message when a user first connects to them, logs in to them, or starts them. It is a way of sending a common message to all users, and may include information about system changes, sys ...

" 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 distributed across an arbitrary number of systems using the new

uucp UUCP is an acronym of 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. A command named is one of the prog ...

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 Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

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 UUCP is an acronym of 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. A command named is one of the pro ...

" addresses, a feature that persists (albeit more for identifying servers than users) in modern Usenet.

ARPAnet The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

addressing was not supported. The message format was designed for compactness rather than flexibility, consistent with the slow dialup

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...

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 was a Usenet news server developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Matt Glickman and Mary Ann Horton as a replacement for A News. It was used on Unix systems from 1981 into the 1990s and is the reference implementation for ...

, 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. A-News-msg-format

References

{{reflist

External links

world.std.com archive containing A News
including documentation and the Delaware Usenet invitation. The source code will need some modification to run on a modern Unix-like system. * Peter H. Salus, 2005
The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin
– Chapter 5: UUCP and USENET Usenet servers