[GNC] Net News

[Adrien Monteleone]

Well, I’ll be.

I never delved into it after I found out my ISP at the time was dropping their server. I wasn’t really using it that much at the time anyway.

And yes, I was using Thunderbird as a reader. (I think it was just Mozilla News or something back in ’93)

I also thought Google Groups had been obliterated, but I see it is still up indeed.

Thanks!

Regards,
Adrien

> On Jul 7, 2020 w28d189, at 12:04 PM, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
> 
> The ISP's view of NNTP is just port 119. Does yours really block it? Try this in Terminal:
>  nc -z news.gmane.io 119
> It should respond
>  Connection to news.gmane.io port 119 [tcp/nntp] succeeded!
> 
> Provided that works you should be able to find a news reader program -- Mozilla's Thunderbird mail client used to work for that -- and connect to gmane.
> 
> Once upon a time News operated as a store-and-forward service like email and in the early days of the commercial internet (soon after the US Department of Defense handed control over to the Department of Commerce in 1992) and internet service providers became a thing it was common for ISPs to set up News servers alongside their mail servers to participate in that. It didn't take long for the news to be centralized and it was no longer necessary for ISPs to provide it. By the turn of the century the web had taken over the mind share and News withered. Many of the old newsgroups live on as Google Groups, e.g. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.C and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork
> 
> *and*
> nc -z -u groups.google.com 119
> Connection to groups.google.com port 119 [udp/nntp] succeeded!
> 
> So if you want to go full retro, you still can.