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. We where 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.

Up to then, what we did was to log in to a joint shell account we had at the joint KTH and Stockholm University Computer Center, QZ. The more we use it, we got into the habit of saving the articles in a file and email it home, to pack them up so we all could read at our Xenix server with the "rn" newsreader.

Not always having time for this, we then simply made a couple of shell scripts checking for new articles, packing them and sending them home. At home a couple of other scripts unpacked the articles in a correct Netnews structure for rn. Small News where running from summer of -91 until the employer scrapped my department in -94.

We do not publish the old scripts here, since nearly no ISP runs C-News today, but we are currently looking into the possibility or rewriting the scripts to support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 smoother, 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, as 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.