B News was a

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 ...

news server A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers. Articles and ...

developed at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

by Matt Glickman and

Mary Ann Horton Mary Ann Horton (born Mark R. Horton, on November 21, 1955), is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including the vi editor and terminfo database, (see Acknowlegments section at end of file) created the firs ...

as a replacement for

A News A News, or Netnews Version A, 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 gi ...

. It was used on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

systems from 1981 into the 1990s and is the

reference implementation In the software development process, a reference implementation (or, less frequently, sample implementation or model implementation) is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification. The reference implementation o ...

for the ''de facto'' Usenet standard described in and . Releases from 2.10.2 were maintained by

UUNET UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was one of the first commercial Internet service providers. Today, UUNET is an internal brand ...

founder Rick Adams. 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 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 ...

-compatible headers, to ease message transfers with the

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 ...

. A history

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

was introduced, allowing articles to be placed in separate directories by

newsgroup 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 distinct ...

, improving retrieval speeds and easing the development of separate newsreader programs such as rn. Support was provided for expiring old articles, and

control message Control messages are a special kind of Usenet post that are used to control news servers. They differ from ordinary posts by a header field named Control. The body of the field contains control name and arguments. There are two historical alterna ...

s (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 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. Functionally, the operati ...

and

InterNetNews InterNetNews (INN) is a Usenet news server package, originally released by Rich Salz in 1991, and presented at the Summer 1992 USENIX conference in San Antonio, Texas. It was the first news server with integrated NNTP functionality. While prev ...

, 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 declared the product obsolete. About 1989,

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...

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.

References

{{Reflist *News B2.10.1, 1983,

Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

version 2.9, under contrib/news

External links

B2.11.19 News sourceTeenage Mutant Ninja Netnews source code
Usenet Usenet servers