rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for 103 +[1]-[1]-(1) \-[2]-[*] | +-[1] +-[5] +[3] -[2] No, we don’t know what it means either, but there are Unix weenies who swear by diagrams like this and the special nonalphabetic keystrokes that “manipulate” this information. The rn family is highly customizable. On the other hand, only the true anal-compulsive Unix weenie really cares if killfiles are stored as $HOME/News/news/group/name/KILL, ~/News.Group.Name, $DOTDIR/K/news.group.name There are times when this capability (which had to be shoehorned into an inflexible environment by means of “% strings” and “escape sequences”) reaches up and bites you: Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 16:26:02 EDT From: Robert E. Seastrom rs@ai.mit.edu To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: rn bites weenie So there I was, wasting my time reading abUsenet news, when I ran across an article that I thought I'd like to keep. RN has this handy lit- tle feature that lets you pipe the current article into any unix program, so you could print the article by typing “| lpr” at the appropriate time. Moveover, you can mail it to yourself or some other lucky person by typing “| mail jrl@fnord.org” at the same prompt. Now, this article that I wanted to keep had direct relevance to what I do at work, so I wanted to mail it to myself there. We have a UUCP connection to uunet (a source of constant joy to me, but that's another flame...), but no domain name. Thus, I sent it to “rs%dead- lock@uunet.uu.net.” Apparently %d means something special to rn, because when I went to read my mail several hours later, I found this in my mailbox: Date: Fri, 27 Sep 91 10:25:32 -0400 From: MAILER-DAEMON@uunet.uu.net (Mail Delivery Subsystem)

104 Snoozenet ----- Transcript of session follows ----- RCPT To:rs/tmp/alt/sys/suneadlock@uunet.uu.net 550 rs/tmp/alt/sys/suneadlock@uunet.uu.net... User unknown 550 rs/tmp/alt/sys/suneadlock@uunet.uu.net... User unknown —Rob When in Doubt, Post I put a query on the net I haven’t got an answer yet. —Ed Nather University of Texas, Austin In the early days of Usenet, a posting could take a week to propagate throughout most of the net because, typically, each long hop was done as an overnight phone call. As a result, Usenet discussions often resembled a cross between a musical round-robin and the children’s game of telephone. Those “early on” in the chain added new facts and even often moved on to something different, while those at the end of the line would recieve mes- sages often out of order or out of context. E-mail was often unreliable, so it made sense to post an answer to someone’s question. There was also the feeling that the question and your answer would be sent together to the next site in the line, so that people there could see that the question had been answered. The net effect was, surprisingly, to reduce volume. Usenet is much faster now. You can post an article and, if you’re on the Internet, it can reach hundreds of sites in five minutes. Like the atom bomb, however, the humans haven’t kept up with the technology. People see an article and feel the rush to reply right away without waiting to see if anyone else has already answered. The software is partly to blame—there’s no good way to easily find out whether someone has already answered the question. Certainly ego is also to blame: Look, ma, my name in lights. As a result, questions posted on Usenet collect lots of public answers. They are often contradictory and many are wrong, but that’s to be expected. Free advice is worth what you pay for it.