9 May
2018
9 May
'18
6:31 a.m.
On May 8, 2018, at 4:39 PM, John Labovitz <johnl(a)johnlabovitz.com> wrote:
Maybe a bit earlier — 1985–1987? — but I always loved Kenneth Almquist’s ‘vnews’ as a
newsreader. There was something incredibly simple and graceful about it. It was
curses-based, but at the same time very Unix-y — no BBS-like prompts or extra noise.
Minimal and perfect. Many times I’ve tried to build a similar interface on modern systems,
and it’s harder than one would think.
A few years back I found a shar file of some late vnews distribution. (Sadly, I can’t
find a link now — but have the sources if anyone wants.) I was surprised how complicated
the C code was, not to mention the build system! No blame to Almquist at all — I’d simply
forgotten how difficult it was in the ‘80s to architect software that could work on more
than one Unix distribution.
I ran vnews, and I think C news, on a Parallel XR300 machine, which was (in theory) a
fault-tolerant box with Sun motherboards. That was in Maryland — I was psc!jsl.
I had stashed away comp.sources.unix archives in 2002.
Volumes 1 through 29. I find the below news related items.
Both vnews (Jan 1985) and rn (May 1985) are in volume 1.
[Now it all seems more complicated than needed.]
$ grep news comp.sources.unix/index
newshar The Connoisseur's Shar, version 2
newsweed Newsweed: a program to delete unwanted news articles
readnews.1 Manual page for 2.10.2 readnews(1)
vnews.1 Manual page for 2.10.2 vnews(1)
vnews/part[1-7] Vnews part 1
xfernews xfernews software
pnews.patch Patch to Pnews to save article
newspace newspace - determine newsgroup disk usage
newbatcha Usenet news batcher control program
newbatchb Usenet news batcher control program
newscnt Count unread news articles
2.11news/part[01-08] 2.11 News Documentation and Conversion
2.11news/part[09-10] 2.11 News Miscellaneous Files
2.11news/part[11-19] 2.11 News Source
2.11news/part20 News change log and makefile
2.11news/patch[01-08] Patch #1 for news 2.11 source
multi-feed.c++ Simultaneous multi-site news feeder in C++
vn/part[01-03] The VN news reader
cnews/part[01-14] C News alpha release
vn.jan.88/part[01-05] VN newsreader, 1/88 version
nntp1.5/part[01-09] Network News Transfer Protocol, version 1.5
headers Selectively retrieve news article headers
cnews2/part[01]19] Cnews production release
cnews1/patch1 Cnews production release, Patch1
nn/part[01-15] NN, a Usenet news reader
nn/patch1 NN, a Usenet news reader, Patch1
snefru/part[01-04] Snefru hash and netnews validation ...
nn6.4/part[01-22] NN Newsreader, release 6.4
nn6.4/patch[1-4] NN newsreader, release 6.4
newsxd/part[01-03] Netnews transmission daemon