Message-ID: <anews.Aucbvax.4080>
Newsgroups: fa.unix-wizards
Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards
From: ucbvax!unix-wizards
Date: Sun Sep 27 22:04:41 1981
Subject: USENET membership
>From cbosg!cbosgd!mark@Berkeley Sun Sep 27 21:47:47 1981
For those of you who don't know, USENET is a logical network of sites
running netnews. Netnews is a network oriented bulliten board, making
it very easy to broadcast a query to a large base of people. USENET
currently has around 50 sites and is growing rapidly. Many ARPANET
digests and mailing lists are on USENET. Netnews helps solve the problems
mentioned by Lauren, in that you only get news when you ask for it (typically
when you log in) rather than with your personal mail, and only one copy
of each article is sent to each host, saving on network traffic and disk space.
If you have a recent 2.8BSD tape, there is USENET information on the
tape, including a directory of sites and their policies on hooking up
new members.
The B version of netnews (the software the implements USENET) is getting
very near release. I estimate a couple more weeks. At that point, I
intend to start a big membership drive on USENET. In particular, I will
encourage all UNIX sites on the ARPANET to join, as well as any non-UNIX
sites that are willing to bring up the software on their systems.
(It's written in C, so if you don't have a C compiler considerable translation
will probably be necessary.) There will also be a push to get more uucp
sites in Bell Labs to join USENET, as well as getting it put in the standard
Berkeley and Bell versions of UNIX.
In general, if you want to join USENET, send me mail and I'll point you at
someone nearby (if you want a uucp link) or set something up (for an ARPANET
link.) In answer to Web Dove's specific query, while there are no USENET
sites at MIT, there are lots of there Unices I would love to see on the net.
The best contact would probably be Mark Plotnik, a graduate student at MIT
who is also active in his USENET site (eagle) at Bell Labs. If arpanet
access is not practical for those machine, I imagine he can create a uucp
hookup to eagle. His address is MP@MIT-EECS. CCA is another possibility.
Mark Horton
CSVAX.mark@Berkeley
(614) 868-4276
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