C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by

Henry Spencer Henry Spencer (born 1955) 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 wrote ''The Ten Commandments for C ...

, at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

as a replacement for

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 ...

. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

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 in mind. It ran on many variants of

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, an ...

and even

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

. 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 {{As of, 2004, alt=current news servers continue to use this method in the form of the

NNTP The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (''netnews'') between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the Univers ...

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 Development of C News stopped about 1995, and the package was largely superseded by

INN Inns are generally establishments or buildings where travelers can seek lodging, and usually, food and drink. Inns are typically located in the country or along a highway; before the advent of motorized transportation they also provided accommo ...

External links

*Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer (1987).
News Need Not Be Slow
'. *Mark Linimon (1994).
C News Frequently Asked Questions
'.
C News source code
Usenet Usenet servers