On May 8, 2018, at 9:23, Seth Morabito 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'm looking especially for nn, which was my go-to at the time. The oldest > version I've found so far is nn 6.4, which is too big to compile on a > 3B2/400. If I could get my hands on 6.1 or earlier, I think I'd have a good > chance. > > I also found that trn 3.6 from 1994 works well enough, though it is fairly > bloated. Earlier versions of that might be better. > > Does anyone have better Google-fu than I do? Or perhaps you've got earlier > sources squirreled away?
It occurred to me (and before I saw Peter Corlett’s post) to go looking for some of the old CD-ROMs that have been uploaded to archive.org, and I found this one: https://archive.org/details/CDROM_March92 "Source Code CDROM” I think it has two versions of nn, 6.4 (from 1990, in UNIX_C/USENET) and 6.3 (from 1989, in USENET/COMPSRCS/UNIX/VOLUME19). Which makes me think that older versions will likely predate the CD-ROM era if they can be found at all. I get the idea that nn may not have escaped from Europe until that comp.sources.unix release of 6.3 in 1989. > As an aside: If you were active on Usenet in 1989, what software were you > using? rn on SunOS, from about 1986 or 1987, on differing hosts. In all cases other folks installed it and I did not notice what versions were involved. Continued with it until 1992 when I switched to GNUS on a SPARCstation. Between 1994 and 1997 I ran strn on a Sun 3/60 which was also running C News with news delivery via uucp, but switched to Gnus when I built a new system with a PC and FreeBSD. -Frank McConnell
