A News

Steve Daniel from Duke offered a presentation on the then-new Usenet network and invited attendees to join.

In addition to the login display, news articles could be read at any time from the command line.

The message format was designed for compactness rather than flexibility, consistent with the slow dialup modems used in 1980.

This scheme was abandoned after A news for the more verbose but expandable format seen today[update].

It was largely superseded by B News, although some organizations continued to use it for internal communications for many years.

Example of an early Usenet article. The legends in bold type are the equivalent header names in a modern Usenet article.