Editing Rn (newsreader)

{{Short description|Software, news client}}
{{one source|date=September 2010}}
{{lowercase|title=rn (newsreader)}}

'''''rn''''' (short for ''Read News'') is a [[Newsreader (Usenet)|Usenet newsreader]] written by [[Larry Wall]] and originally released in 1984. It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of a character-addressable [[Computer terminal|CRT terminal]] (<code>vnews</code> by Kenneth Almquist was first). Previous newsreaders, such as ''readnews'', were mostly line-oriented and designed for use on the printing terminals which were common on the early [[Unix]] minicomputers where the [[Usenet]] software and network originated.  Later variants of the original ''rn'' program included ''rrn'', ''trn'', and ''strn''.<ref>{{cite web
   |url=http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/software/part1/
   |title=Usenet Software: History and Sources
   |author=Mark Moraes
   |date=December 28, 1999
}}</ref>

==Features==
''rn'' was also notable for three other features it introduced: [[Kill file]], "do the right thing", and automatic configuration. 

A Kill file is a [[computer file|file]] (called, obviously enough, {{mono|KILL}}) containing [[regular expressions]] matched against the subjects of news articles in each group. If an article matches, it is marked as having already been read. This feature was essential as the growth of the Usenet made it impossible to read every article in even a limited selection of newsgroups.

"Do the right thing" introduced a fundamental change in [[user-interface]] from previous news software. Rather than require a user to navigate menus or learn a command vocabulary for each mode of the program, certain single-keystroke commands were used throughout the user interface to perform the most appropriate function based on context. For example, the space character will "go on to the next thing", and the ''next thing'' could be the next page, the next article, or the next newsgroup, depending on where the user is in the process of reading news.

Finally, automatic configuration is a feature for [[system administrator]]s {{endash}} not visible to [[end user|users]] {{endash}} that allows for [[software build|building]] and [[Installation (computer programs)|installing]] the application with relative ease. Most Unix programs, and in particular Usenet software, were (and still often are) distributed in [[source code]] form which requires building and installing before users can use it. Because different versions of Unix were organized differently, a system administrator required sufficient programming skill to modify the source code to account for these differences. ''rn'' changed that paradigm by including a script, called ''Configure'', with enough intelligence to customize the build and install process for the system it was running on. Since its introduction in the ''rn'' [[codebase]], the pattern of including a similar [[configure script]] in any [[software distribution]] became and still is popular.

==History==
Like all of the original newsreaders and the Usenet software itself, ''rn'' was designed for the environment of a large [[time-sharing|time-shared]] [[minicomputer]], which users connected to using terminals wired directly to the machine, and where the only networks available were accessed by slow and expensive dial-up modem connections.  All of the articles in all of the newsgroups were stored in files on the local disk (known as the "news spool"), and ''rn'' could simply read those files directly when presenting them to the user.  When [[local area network]]s became widespread, it was natural that administrators and users would desire remote access to the news spool, and [[Network News Transfer Protocol|NNTP]], the Network News Transfer Protocol, was developed to serve that need.  While working at [[Baylor College of Medicine]], Stan O. Barber developed ''remote rn'' ('''''rrn'''''), a set of [[Patch (Unix)|patch]]es to ''rn'' which allowed it to communicate with an NNTP server over a local-area (or even wide-area) network.  Barber later took over maintenance responsibility for ''rn'' itself from Larry Wall.

As news volumes continued to increase, it became apparent that even KILL files could not possibly keep up with the sheer number of users and articles.  A new concept, the ''[[Threaded discussion|threaded]]'' newsreader, was needed as users gradually switched from a "read most, kill few" model to "ignore most, read few".  By organizing the articles in a newsgroup according to threads of discussion, using headers that had long been present in Usenet articles but practically unused, a threaded newsreader would allow users to keep up with topics and discussions they were interested without having to explicitly deselect uninteresting threads. Kim F. Storm's ''nn'' newsreader was the first to implement this new model, and it looked for a while as if ''nn'' would do to ''rn'' what ''rn'' did to ''readnews''.  This fate was averted when Wayne Davison developed '''''trn''''', a set of patches to ''rn'' which gave it both threading at the article level and a new user interface that would allow users to select only the threads they desired, while remaining true to the original ''rn'' interface philosophy of ''do the right thing''.

An even more recent addition to the ''rn'' family has been the addition of ''scoring'', which allows a more complex method of evaluating articles to determine whether the user wishes to read them; originally this was implemented in a [[code fork]] of ''trn'' called ''strn'', but later this was integrated into the official ''trn'' distribution.

==See also==
*[[List of Usenet newsreaders]]
*[[Comparison of Usenet newsreaders]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
*[news:news.software.readers news.software.readers newsgroup]


[[Category:Free Usenet clients]]