C News is a

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 ...

package, written by

Geoff Collyer Geoff Collyer (born 1958) is a Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of ''C News'', a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview database (article index) used by all modern newsreaders. He contrib ...

, 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 P ...

, at the

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

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 f ...

. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C. 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, ...

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 o ...

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 Development of C News stopped about 1995, and the package was largely superseded by INN.

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