January 11, 1994

Reading NetNews (USENET) on MacIntosh Computers
_______________________________________________

I asked what people on macs are using for Netnews reader.
It is called NewsWatcher.

It is available FREE from an anonymous ftp site:
  ftp.acns.nwu.edu
in the folder
  pub/newswatcher

Here is how I went in to get it (Macintosh users will use a menu
driven ftp program such as Fetch):

#145 kral@eda> ftp ftp.acns.nwu.edu
Connected to ftp.acns.nwu.edu.
220 charlie FTP server (Version wu-2.4(2) Fri Sep 23 15:58:09 CDT 1994) ready.
Name (ftp.acns.nwu.edu:kral): ftp
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
Password:
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd pub/newswatcher
250-Please read the file README
250-  it was last modified on Fri Jan  6 22:46:57 1995 - 5 days ago
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> get README
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for README (1829 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
local: README remote: README
1876 bytes received in 0.38 seconds (4.8 Kbytes/s)
ftp> ls 
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list.
helpers
inn-xpat-patch.txt
url-ae-standard.txt
old-release-notes
release-notes-20b24.txt
README
newswatcher-20b24.sea.hqx
source-20b24.sea.hqx
posting-delays-note.txt
rfc-1738-urls.txt
user-doc.postcard.sea.hqx
user-doc.msword.sea.hqx
226 Transfer complete.
247 bytes received in 0.0032 seconds (76 Kbytes/s)
ftp> 

This is the README file that I got from them:

NewsWatcher is a free Macintosh USENET news reader.

NewsWatcher requires a Mac running System 7.0 or later with 2.5
megabytes or more of memory and a hard drive. The Mac must be
connected to the Internet, and MacTCP mut be properly installed
and configured. For dialup use, NewsWatcher works together with
the various SLIP and PPP programs, and with AppleTalk Remote 
Access together with an appropriately configured AppleTalk/IP
gateway.

newswatcher-20b24.sea.hqx: The program.
release-notes-20b24.txt: Release notes for 2.0b24.
user-doc.postcard.sea.hqx: The user doc in postcard format.
user-doc.msword.sea.hqx: The user doc in MS Word format.
source-20b24.sea.hqx: The CodeWarrior source code.

You only need to get one of the user doc files. They are the
same document in two different formats. The "postcard" version
contains its own viewing and printing software, so you don't
need a copy of the word processor I used to create the doc.
The "msword" version is in Microsoft Word format.

The "helpers" subdirectory contains copies of other programs
which NewsWatcher uses to help it decode binary files and 
open URLs.

The "old-release-notes" subdirectory contains old release
notes for previous beta releases of NewsWatcher 2.0.

The file "inn-xpat-patch.txt" contains a patch your server 
administrator can apply to INN 1.4 to fix a problem with the
XPAT command. See the user doc for details.

The file "posting-delays-note.txt" contains a note about
why posting takes so long with some kinds of old and 
misconfigured news servers.

The file "url-ae-standard.txt" is a document which describes
the standard URL Apple event suite.

The file "rfc-1738-urls.txt" is a copy of the Internet RFC
standards document for URLs.

John Norstad
Academic Computing and Network Services
Northwestern University
j-norstad@nwu.edu


				Regards,

				Fred

				JFKral@LBL.Gov 1-510-486-7435, Fax=5101
				J. Frederic Kral, Lawrence Berkeley Lab