Netnews redesign

[Rich Braun]

Years ago, I wrote a bulletin board program for the DEC-10 which stored
what amounted to a newsgroup in a single file, with an index table.  Each
message was basically a record in a database, containing fields like
From, Date, and so on, with a variable-length field containing the
text.

This provided not only efficient file storage in terms of space, but also
made retrieval and search operations extremely fast.  (By caching a
newsgroup's index table in memory, retrieval of any given message could
be done in 0 or 1 seeks of the disk.)

Alas, this code was written in assembly language and is no longer useful.
I've mentioned to a few acquaintances the possibility of creating a new
news system (or modifying the existing one) which stored newsgroups as
databases rather than as directories of individual files, and the
common response is "I'd lose the use of all my familiar Unix tools",
probably just meaning that slow-as-molasses 'grep' wouldn't work.

Is there a netnews development project anywhere with which I could
correspond on this type of design issue?  I've toyed with the idea of
creating a complete communications package, at the heart of which would
be an improved netnews system.  But if someone else is working on one
I'd desperately love to talk to that person.  My other interest in this,
naturally, is to create a completely portable (and free) system which
could run on systems like DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, and VAX/VMS.  Netnews
is simply too valuable to be relegated only to the Unix world.

-rich