SmallNews - netnews distribution
In
-91/-92 B-News and C-News where the dominating Usenet
distribution programs on Internet. NNTP had just begun
to take over. I was sitting at a small site, with limited
resources. To use C-News would have ment a large investment
in disks we couldn't motivate, specially as we wanted
to take home the comp.sources and alt.sources-groups.
And they where large.
What we did up til then,
where to log in to a shell account we had at the joint
KTH and Stockholm
University Computer Center, QZ. As we got to use it
more, I saved the articles in a file and mailed it home,
to pack it up so we could read it with the rn newsreader.
Not always having time for this, I then simply made a
couple of shell scripts, checking new articles, packing
them and sending them home. At home a couple of other
scripts unpacked the articles in a correct structure for
rn. Small News where running from summer of -91 until
the employer scrapped my department in -94.
I do not publish the old scripts here, since nearly no
ISP runs C-News today, but I am currently looking into
the possibility or rewriting the scripts to support NNTP-protocol
both at the ISP and at the local site. It would give leaf-sites,
with only mail access to Internet and having a local UNIX
(or maybe even a NT) crate, a smother, simpler system
than finding a ISP that still can supply C-News. It would
hide the fact that the local site is not a fully connected
site for most of it's users.
Small News where
supporting som 200 groups in the end. One smart detail
with Small News where that we could define groups, fx.
comp.sources, in which we took home only the first 20
or 200 lines of a post, since they often where some 64
KB (today even more), allowing us to view the content
and manually retreive interesting threads in full.
