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 an ...

package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the

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

as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987

USENIX USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

conference in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

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, multi-user 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, a ...

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 op ...

. 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 Unive ...

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 accomm ...

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