C News is a
news server package, written by
Geoff Collyer, 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 institu ...
as a replacement for
B News. 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
Portability may refer to:
*Portability (social security), the portability of social security benefits
* Porting, the ability of a computer program to be ported from one system to another in computer science
** Software portability, the 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, 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 oper ...
. 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 Univ ...
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 accommo ...
.
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