[TUHS] Old Usenet newsreader source code?

[bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

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On May 8, 2018, at 4:39 PM, John Labovitz <johnl at 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