Acbosgd.127
net.news
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!harpo!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Mon Oct 26 15:16:19 1981
change of names netnews and USENET
An amazing number of people have been confused by the similarity
of the names USENET and UUCP net, and think they are the same thing.
This is almost true, since most USENET sites are also on UUCP, but
of course there are many UUCP sites that are not on USENET, and there
are several USENET sites that aren't on UUCP.

I am toying with the idea of changing the names USENET (the network
itself) and netnews (the collection of software that implements netnews)
both to "newsnet".  The names of the individual programs in version B
(inews, readnews, checknews) would not change, and I see no reason to
change the program name "news" either, although some sites might want
to change "netnews" to "newsnet", this would certainly not be required.
There would be no software impact here, only verbal impact.

Since this is a sweeping change, and since I'm not God, I would like
to see discussion on whether this is a good thing to do.  Please reply
to net.news.

	Mark