A News, or Netnews Version A, originally known simply as news, was the first widely distributed program for serving and reading

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

newsgroups A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start ...

. The program, written at

Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...

by Steve Daniel and

Tom Truscott Tom Truscott is an American computer scientist best known for creating Usenet with Jim Ellis, when both were graduate students at Duke University. He is also a member of ACM, IEEE, and Sigma Xi. One of his first endeavors into computers was wr ...

, was released on a tape given out at the June 1980

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 held at the

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially known as UD, UDel, or Delaware) is a Statutory college#Delaware, privately governed, state-assisted Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Newark, Delaware, United States. UD offers f ...

. Steve Daniel from Duke offered a presentation on the then-new Usenet network and invited attendees to join.

Seventh Edition Unix Version 7 Unix, also called Seventh Edition Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercia ...

included a " message of the day" facility, which allowed the system operator to cause messages to be displayed to the user at login. A News (so called because each message began with "A" as a marker character) was an expansion of this facility that allowed news messages to be distributed across an arbitrary number of systems using the new

uucp UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy) is a suite of computer programs and communications protocol, protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of computer file, files, email and netnews between computers. A command named is one of the prog ...

service. In addition to the login display, news articles could be read at any time from the command line. A user could also post new messages to the local machine (by posting to a special default newsgroup called "general") or queue it for network-wide transmission by placing it in a public group such as "NET.general". The software was designed primarily for announcements, so the interface was extremely simple. There were no provisions built in for replying to articles over news (

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

replies were supported), skipping over messages, or threading. Because the system was designed only with uucp in mind, posters were identified by their uucp " bang path" addresses, a feature that persists (albeit more for identifying servers than users) in modern Usenet.

ARPAnet The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

addressing was not supported. The message format was designed for compactness rather than flexibility, consistent with the slow dialup

modem The Democratic Movement (, ; MoDem ) is a centre to centre-right political party in France, whose main ideological trends are liberalism and Christian democracy, and that is characterised by a strong pro-Europeanist stance. MoDem was establis ...

s used in 1980. The initial "A" dictated the layout of header and message information, and expansions would require changing the initial character. This scheme was abandoned after A news for the more verbose but expandable format seen . Because Usenet grew rapidly, the limited capabilities and simplistic article storage scheme (all articles were placed in a single disk directory and there was no facility for expiring old articles) quickly made A News impractical to use. It was largely superseded by B News, although some organizations continued to use it for internal communications for many years. Later modifications did add the ability to process the early B News article format and act on B News control articles. A-News-msg-format

References

{{reflist

External links

world.std.com archive containing A News
including documentation and the Delaware Usenet invitation. The source code will need some modification to run on a modern Unix-like system. * Peter H. Salus, 2005
The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin
– Chapter 5: UUCP and USENET Computer-related introductions in 1980 Usenet servers