A News
More info
- Creator
- Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, Steve Daniel
- Released
- 1979–1980
- Type
- News software
- Successor
- B News
The very first Usenet software, built at Duke for a network where a handful of posts a day counted as busy.
In 1979 Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, graduate students at Duke University, wanted to link Unix machines for discussion without anyone needing an ARPANET contract. The first version was a shell script; Steve Daniel rewrote it in C, and it was unveiled at the Usenix conference in January 1980. Articles were stored as plain files and shipped between machines over UUCP and dial-up modems.
The design assumed every site could read everything, groups would stay few, and traffic would hover around a couple of articles a day. None of that lasted. By 1981 the network had outgrown it, and Berkeley wrote B News as a replacement. A News is mostly remembered for proving the idea worked — and that it was going to get much bigger than anyone had planned for.