On 8/9/22 20:30, Russ Allbery wrote:
> hurst <
se...@home.sethhurst.com> writes:
>
>> Was wondering who came up with the dots in a newsgroup?
>
> I think it dates back to the original A News, so presumably Steve Daniel
> and Tom Truscott back in 1980. (Small bit of trivia: there used to be a
> distinction between the local newsgroup "general" and the distributed
> newsgroup "NET.general", and the NET was in all caps.)
>
> B News in 1981 introduced the current lowercase naming scheme, although
> net.* (and, later, mod.*) were used for quite some time until the Great
> Renaming.
>
>> Is it hard coded and how do you prevent hierarchies from being taken
>> over?
>
> I don't know what "taken over" means here.
>
>> Was wondering why they never used colons dashes or even pound signs?
>
> I'm not sure why "NET." was picked as the prefix insead of some other
> punctuation. A News predates DNS, so it's not by analogy for domain
> names, I don't think. Maybe periods were just in the air.
>
>> Does a newsgroup always have to have a dot in between it or does it
>> always have to have two or more levels in it?
>
> It doesn't have to have a dot. All news software that I'm aware of will
> cope with newsgroup names with no periods in them. However, much of the
> configuration for processing control messages and choosing which messages
> to send to peers is based on hierarchies.
>
website. too bad there was only two chapters.