tin is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

, text-based, threaded newsreader, used to read and post messages on

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 ...

, the worldwide distributed discussion system.

History

Tin was initially used on text-only

computer terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...

s connected via a slow serial interface to a multi-user

time sharing In computing, time-sharing is the concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each task or user a small slice of processing time. This quick switch between tasks or users gives the illusion of simultaneous ...

central server, where graphics were generally not supported and when the

computer mouse A computer mouse (plural mice; also mouses) is a hand-held pointing device that detects Plane (mathematics), two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of the Cursor (user interface)#Po ...

did not yet exist. At the time, tin was considered to be somewhat of a high-resource program in this environment (similar to

Pine A pine is any conifer tree or shrub in the genus ''Pinus'' () of the family Pinaceae. ''Pinus'' is the sole genus in the subfamily Pinoideae. ''World Flora Online'' accepts 134 species-rank taxa (119 species and 15 nothospecies) of pines as cu ...

) due to its use of terminal cursor control and page-oriented text scrolling to make navigating Usenet easier. While it did not have graphics support it does provide a visually organized browser-oriented drill-down list of groups, subjects, and then articles, as opposed to simply scrolling endless pages and menus upward from the bottom of the screen. Tin is available for a variety of

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. It is based on the TASS newsreader, whose

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

had been posted in 1991 on

by Rich Skrenta. The work on tin was begun shortly afterward by Iain Lea, who provided information for the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

RFC 2980. Since 1996, tin has been maintained by Urs Janßen. The program is generally compared with trn or nn. The latter is also based on TASS. Some note that tin has the most flexible threading support. Tin runs on any

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 ...

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX; ) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...

platform. This is because tin was an early adopter of autoconf, in 1996. Older versions of tin also ran on

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Op ...

; the newer versions which have

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

support do not. The original tin used

termcap Termcap ("terminal capability") is a legacy software library (computing), library and database used on Unix-like computers that enables programs to use display computer terminals in a terminal-independent manner, which greatly simplifies the proc ...

. Along with the portability improvements gained by using autoconf, its developers improved the adaptability by making it work with terminfo or curses—again improving portability. Other changes, such as localization using gettext, as well as

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

support have kept the application current. Unlike trn or nn, it is easy to follow the progress of changes since 1995 in tin because its changelog is detailed and dated.

References

External links

*{{Official website Free software programmed in C Free Usenet clients Termcap Terminfo Curses (programming library) Software using the BSD license

History

See also

References

External links