[SlugLUG] rn vs. trn vs. tin

[Erich Blume]

I learned about usenet (brace yourselves) less than a year ago. I'd never
had a need to use it when I was younger, and by the time I was old enough to
find it interesting, it was already past what I believe is referred to as
the "September that never ended." (
http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html)

But I still browse it from time to time, seeing the last vestiges of what
was obviously at one point a great resource for our kind. Clearly it is
still religiously used by some, and it is by no means gone or in it's death
throws, but just the shear amount of stupidity and spam I believe marks
Usenet's inevitable decline.

I'm still looking for something uniquely "hacker" to fill what I see as a
gap in my learning experience that Usenet would have filled a decade ago.
Some sort of archaic BBS left standing. I mostly get that fix from freenode,
now.

Erich

On 9/30/06 11:50 PM, "Thomas Leavitt" <thomas at thomasleavitt.org> wrote:

> ... when i got to college in 1990, the whole campus had just been wired
> into the school's PrimeOS minicomputer... every room had the ability to
> hook up a computer via a dedicated 9600 baud serial connection (which
> was really fast, compared to the 300 and 1200 baud modems I was used to
> using - bought 'em cheap at swap meets, don't remember whether we got a
> 2400 baud modem in the house before I left for school... i think the
> bleeding edge at that point were 9600 baud modems that ran some kind of
> proprietary protocol - damn, I can't recall the company's name at that
> point)...
> 
> anyway, so the PrimeOS had a usenet feed... i'd been participating on a
> large scale local conferencing system with hundreds of users, that ran
> this, quite honestly, utterly lame piece of software called caucus (or
> something like that) that ran on an HP minicomputer, and so when i saw
> usenet, i was quite impressed... here's the kicker though... I'm not
> sure how I found out about usenet, someone probably showed me while i
> was hanging out in the lab... but I spent months reading usenet with
> "rn" (read news) before one day, i stumbled across "trn" (threaded read
> news). holy granola, that made it so much easier / faster to read news!!! :)
> 
> "Trn  is  a threaded version of rn, which is a replacement for the
> read-news(1) program.  Being "threaded" means that the articles  are
> inter-connected in reply order." (no version of just plain old rn is
> available for mandriva - the man page for the trn version available
> looks like it was last updated with bsd 4.3)
> 
> here's a blast from the past, courtesy of the trn man page:
> 
>   Any  switch  may  be selectively applied according to the current baud-
>        rate.  Simply prefix the switch with +speed to apply the switch
> at that
>        speed or greater, and -speed to apply the switch at that speed or
> less.
>        Examples: -1200-hposted suppresses the Posted  line  at  1200
> baud  or
>        less;  +9600-m enables marking at 9600 baud or more.  You can
> apply the
>        modifier recursively to itself also: +300-1200-t sets terse
> mode  from
>        300 to 1200 baud.
> 
> LOL!
> 
> I think at a later time, I discovered tin, which apparently isn't
> available in binary form for Mandriva, and decided that was a further
> improvement...
> 
> i remember spending hours a day reading news, and minutes a day reading
> email... news was vastly more efficient before the spammers got to it...
> 
> thomas
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