The following is abstracted from the article "USENET Software: History
and Sources" posted in news.announce.newusers (and cross-posted to
news.software.b) every 4-6 weeks.  It is a much more exhaustive survey
of available transports and readers.

The original news software was just called news; once a rewrite called
B News became available, the original version became known as A News.
A News is totally obsolete.  B News, although still installed on many
sites across the net, is also obsolete and no longer being maintained.
In fact, the last maintainer now uses INN.

Currently-maintained news software includes, among others, the C News
package and INN (InterNetworkNews package).  See below for descriptions
of each of these packages.  (The ANU-news package is discussed on
news.software.anu-news, also see below).

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