tin is an open-source text-based and threaded news client, used to read and post messages on the

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 wa ...

global communications network.

History

Tin was initially used on text-only display terminals connected via a slow serial interface to a multi-user

time sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

central server, where graphics were generally not supported and when the

computer mouse A computer mouse (plural mice, sometimes mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, which allows a smooth ...

did not yet exist. At the time, tin was considered to be somewhat of a high-resource program in this environment (similar to the Pine email client) due to its use of terminal cursor control and page-oriented text scrolling to make navigating Usenet easier. While it did not have graphics support it does provide a visually organized browser-oriented drill-down list of groups, subjects, and then articles, as opposed to simply scrolling endless pages and menus upwards from the bottom of the screen. Tin is available for a variety of

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s. It is based on the TASS newsreader, whose

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

had been posted in 1991 on

Rich Skrenta Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (born June 6, 1967) is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the web search engine blekko.Arrington, Michael (2008-01-02). "The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko". TechCrunch, 2 Jan ...

. The work on tin was begun shortly afterwards by Iain Lea, who provided information for the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

RFC 2980. Since 1996, tin has been maintained by Urs Janßen. The program is generally compared with trn or nn. The latter is also based on TASS. Some note that tin has the most flexible threading support. Tin runs on any

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 ...

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inter ...

platform. This is because tin was an early adopter of

autoconf GNU Autoconf is a tool for producing configure scripts for building, installing, and packaging software on computer systems where a Bourne shell is available. Autoconf is agnostic about the programming languages used, but it is often used for ...

, in 1996. Older versions of tin also ran on OpenVMS; the newer versions which have

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of ...

support do not. The original tin used

termcap Termcap (''terminal capability'') is a software library and database used on Unix-like computers. It enables programs to use display computer terminals in a device-independent manner, which greatly simplifies the process of writing portable text ...

. Along with the portability improvements gained by using autoconf, its developers improved the adaptability by making it work with

terminfo Terminfo is a library and database that enables programs to use display terminals in a device-independent manner. Mary Ann Horton implemented the first terminfo library in 1981–1982 as an improvement over termcap. The improvements include * fast ...

curses A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular ...

—again improving portability. Other changes, such as localization using

gettext In computing, gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems. One of the main benefits of gettext is that it separates program ...

, as well as

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv ...

support have kept the application current. Unlike trn or nn, it is easy to follow the progress of changes since 1995 in tin because its changelog is detailed and dated.

References

External links

*{{Official website Free software programmed in C Free Usenet clients Termcap Terminfo Curses (programming library) Software using the BSD license

History

See also

References

External links