Status-Q

I’m chuffed to discover, while looking for something else, that a script I wrote – called newslist – is still included as a demo in the Python distribution. I sent it to Guido in 1994.

It was basically a simple interface to Usenet (NNTP) news servers, so I shouldn’t really draw attention to it because it probably hasn’t had a lot of use in the last decade or so!

The included documentation, however, may induce a little nostalgia in those who were involved in the early web. It begins:

                             NEWSLIST
                             ========
            A program to assist HTTP browsing of newsgroups
            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WWW browsers such as NCSA Mosaic allow the user to read newsgroup
articles by specifying the group name in a URL eg 'news:comp.answers'.

To browse through many groups, though, (and there are several thousand
of them) you really need a page or pages containing links to all the
groups. There are some good ones out there, for example,

    http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/News/Groups/Overview.html

is the standard one at CERN, but it only shows the groups available there,
which may be rather different from those available on your machine.

Newslist is a program which creates a hierarchy of pages for you based
on the groups available from YOUR server. It is written in python - a
splendid interpreted object-oriented language which I suggest you get
right now from the directory /pub/python at ftp.cwi.nl, if you haven't
already got it.

Note that we hadn’t yet started to call it ‘the Web’.

I was just too late to make it into the Python 1.0 distribution. But for this and a couple of other small early contributions, I find I’ve been in the Python acknowledgements since 1.0.2, nearly 19 years ago.

‘Tis an honour I dreamed not of.

🙂