tin (newsreader)
More info
- Creator
- Iain Lea
- Released
- 1991
- Type
- Newsreader
The menu-driven terminal newsreader that put threads on screen instead of leaving them in the reader's head.
Iain Lea released tin in 1991, building on Rich Skrenta's tass. Where rn and trn expected users to memorise a couple of dozen single-letter commands, tin showed a list of groups, then a list of threads, then the articles — all navigable with arrow keys in a curses screen. It could read from a local spool or over NNTP, which suited university timesharing machines where students logged in over Telnet.
For plenty of 1990s newcomers, tin simply was Usenet. It is still maintained, making it one of the few newsreaders to outlive Deja News, Google Groups and most of the groups it used to read.