From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: johnl@johnlabovitz.com (John Labovitz) Date: Tue, 8 May 2018 19:39:00 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Old Usenet newsreader source code? In-Reply-To: <1525796737.680198.1365037152.60B79FDC@webmail.messagingengine.com> References: <1525796737.680198.1365037152.60B79FDC@webmail.messagingengine.com> Message-ID: <81216ABB-D4DF-4A63-B26D-6DB2A5428E1F@johnlabovitz.com> On May 8, 2018, at 12:25 PM, Seth Morabito wrote: > As an aside: If you were active on Usenet in 1989, what software were you using? 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. —John