The
Network News Transfer Protocol or
NNTP is an
Internet application
protocol used primarily for reading and posting
Usenet articles (aka netnews), as well as transferring news among
news servers. Brian Kantor of the
University of California, San Diego and
Phil Lapsley of the
University of California, Berkeley completed
RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March
1986. Other contributors included
Stan Barber from the
Baylor College of Medicine and
Erik Fair of
Apple Computer.
Usenet was originally designed around the UUCP network, with most article transfers taking place over direct computer-to-computer telephone links. Readers and posters would log into the same computers that hosted the servers, reading the articles directly from the local disk.
As local area networks and the Internet became more commonly used, it became desirable to allow newsreaders to be run on personal computers, and a means of employing the Internet to handle article transfers was desired. A newsreader, also known as a news client, is an application software that reads articles on Usenet (generally known as newsgroup), either directly from the news server's disks or via the NNTP.
Because networked Internet-compatible filesystems were not yet widely available, it was decided to develop a new protocol that resembled SMTP, but was tailored for reading newsgroups.
