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 wa ...

news server 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 as a replacement for A News. 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, an ...

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 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

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. A history

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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 distinc ...

, 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 and InterNetNews, 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 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 version 2.9, under contrib/news

External links

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