On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 12:23 PM, Seth Morabito via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > I'm experimenting with setting up UUCP and Usenet on a cluster of 3B2/400s, > and I've quickly discovered that while it's trivial to find old source code > for Usenet (B News and C News), it's virtually impossible to find source code > for old news *readers*.
I might try delving through comp.sources.unix of the period 1985-1989... > I'm looking especially for nn, which was my go-to at the time. I don't think I ever used nn. > I also found that trn 3.6 from 1994 works well enough, though it is fairly > bloated. Earlier versions of that might be better. ISTR using 'trn' for a while, but not that late. Probably 1992 or 1993? > Does anyone have better Google-fu than I do? Or perhaps you've got earlier > sources squirreled away? I likely have backups of UNIX machines I used in the late 80s but not anywhere quickly accessible. They would be on 9-track tape (I have a working tsz07 SCSI tape drive for those times I need to read old tapes). It would definitely be faster to find public sources than my old backups. I would have used whatever was common for the day on BSD UNIX with no house mods. > As an aside: If you were active on Usenet in 1989, what software were you > using? In 1989 I was running a UUCP box at work (Ultrix on a VAX-11/730) and UUCP on my Amiga at home. I didn't have a 300MB news spool and my max transfer speed was 2300 baud, so I wasn't running a full feed. My fingers remember 'rn' and 'trn' for UNIX news readers. I forget what I used on the Amiga, probably Matt Dillon's rn clone or perhaps tin. -ethan
