[SlugLUG] rn vs. trn vs. tin

[Thomas Leavitt]

... 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