From: black.hole.4.spam{at}gmail.com (Don Hills)

In article , "Frank Haber"
 wrote:
>So was this YARN a screen-scraper?  Did it do the usual USENET
"threading" or
>something more sophisticated.

No, it was designed as the next step up from a remote terminal on a BBS
system. It provided offline reading/managing/responding, just as GCP etc
did for Compuserve. It takes posts from Fidonet. nntp (Usenet) or email,
and presents a single user interface to read/manage/respond to them.

It has various filtering and threading options. I usually filter incoming
email into spam, unknown, known sender, and various mailing list folders,
then view each in turn sorted by arrival order. For news, I filter into
newsgroups then view threaded by xref.

>I developed quite an affection for these boards (Magpie was one).  The
>"infinite memory" of the archived, indented message base was
like an oral
>history of your friends and of your fights.  I think it had an organic life
>quite beyond the simple text of the stored messages.  But I gush.  Times are
>different now.

Google Groups provides the "infinite memory" for Usenet. Except
for those posts with "X-no-archive: Yes" in the headers, which
Google Groups deletes after 7 days.

--
Don Hills    (dmhills at attglobaldotnet)     Wellington, New Zealand
"New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager,
 preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"
    -- Advertisement on the box for Microsoft Windows 2.11 for 286

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5