Re: The early gnus shars

[Karl Kleinpaste <k@charcoal.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> I wonder how much work it would be to get Gnus 2.0 up and running on
> modern Emacsen -- just to see what it looks like in action.

You need rnews.el and rnewspost.el -- I don't know if they're part of
any Emacs or XEmacs distribution any more, though I've got ancient
copies of my own from somewhere.

No scorefiles, no frames, limited font switching (pretty much only the
b\bba\bac\bck\bks\bsp\bpa\bac\bce\be _\bk_\bi_\bn_\bd), no daemons, only one server, no mail support at all,
no smileys.

It doesn't know about MODE READER, which caused me a moment's
consternation.

Possibly the best part about it, in a backhandedly humorous mode:

It auto-subscribes every possible newsgroup.  Forgive Masanobu Umeda
for his shortsightedness in this regard: At the time of GNUS 2.x, B
News 2.11.17 was the current server software, which still used a
maximum group count in defs.h of 512.  My usual server today has
(only) 12,000 groups.  It took XEmacs 21.4, running this old GNUS, 58
seconds just to do the start-up auto-subscriptions, followed by
another 54 seconds of "checking new news" before it displayed the
*Newsgroup* (today's *Group*) buffer, on this AMD 1.2GHz Linux
machine.

Awesome.

--karl