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Aucbvax.4080 fa.unix-wizards utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards Sun Sep 27 22:04:41 1981 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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