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From: molenda@s1.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: NNTP's Place in USENET
Message-ID: <1991May12.002343.5885@s1.msi.umn.edu>
Date: 12 May 91 00:23:43 GMT
References: <1991May9.190812.18713@mccc.edu> <1991May11.204136.10230@cylink.uucp>
Organization: The Very Large Group of People Who Wish to Have More Money
Lines: 20

cliff@cylink.uucp (Clifton Shak) writes:

>NNTP stands for Network News Transfer Protocol.  It's purpose is covered in
>RFC977.  The basic idea is that with machines hooked up via high speed
>networks, there should be no need to ship an entire newsfeed to each machine,
>wasting disk space and tying up the network.  A user on a machine should be
>able to request just the articles he wants to read from a central news server,
>interactively.  NNTP provides the mechanisms for doing this.  Nice idea,
>especially for clusters of workstations tied to a server.

A small point:  It is also used commonly to transfer news between news
server hosts.  So it does two functions:  it provides a reading interface
for news-less hosts (e.g. a cluster of machines all reading from one
server on a campus/business/whatever) and it also serves to transfer
news between systems over high speed networks.  There is occasionally
talk of splitting it into two seperate programs, although that would
be quite a way in the future if it ever happens.
-- 
Jason Molenda, Tech Support, Iris & News Admin, Minnesota Supercomputer Inst
molenda@msi.umn.edu || "You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish."