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C News

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This article is about the software package. For the French TV channel, see CNews.

C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C.

Functionally, the operation of C News is very much like that of B News. One major difference was that C News was written with portability in mind. It ran on many variants of Unix and even MS-DOS. The relaynews program that handled article filing and feeding was carefully optimized and designed to process articles in batches, while B News processed one article per program invocation. The authors claimed that relaynews could process articles 19 times as quickly as B News.

In 1992, Collyer gave C News a new index facility called NOV (or News Overview). This allowed newsreaders to rapidly retrieve header and threading information with relatively little load on the server. Virtually all current^[update] news servers continue to use this method in the form of the NNTP XOVER command. Development of C News stopped about 1995, and the package was largely superseded by INN.

• Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer (1987). News Need Not Be Slow.
• Mark Linimon (1994). C News Frequently Asked Questions.
• C News source code