Eric's Site - TLNews Newsreader

TLNews was a Usenet reader. Wikipedia defines Usenet as "a worldwide distributed discussion system [...] conceived in 1979". It allows people to subscribe to groups covering a wide range of topics and converse publicly.

At some point attachments, called "binaries", became possible and Usenet became the largest repository of files on the Internet. It is not uncommon to see Usenet providers hosting files for close to a decade.

In order to know what messages or files were in a specific group, users had to download the group "headers", sometimes amounting to many millions.

TLNews was an exercise in managing a massive amount of information as fast as possible. It had features not available in other readers, such as multithreaded headers down to maximize the Internet bandwidth and real-time compression and decompression of data, allowing it to keep a staggering amount of headers in memory at any one time.

Advanced indexing and compression at download time allowed users to load a massive amount of headers almost instantaneously.

TLNews also was miles ahead of the competition in how it parsed and sometimes reconstructed damaged headers based on other similar headers. It would also easily turn a poorly quoted mess of a text into a nice readable layout that was easy to follow and reply to.

TLNews ended up having a massive amount of features, in part due to user requests and did quite well in term of sales and reviews.