• You will need at least a Macintosh Plus or higher machine running System 7. ToadNews takes advantage of System 7 specific features like file aliases and drag and drop.
• You will need a hard drive. The bigger the better. There are approximately 1300 Usenet newsgroups that you can choose to subscribe to. A general rule is that amount of disk space that news will occupy will grow proportionally to the amount of newsgroups that you receive from your newsfeed.
• A modem is a must, since UUCP usually transports newbatches through serial lines. The faster the modem, the better -- but a 2400 bps modem does the job nicely, albeit a little slowly.
• A Usenet newsfeed. A "newsfeed" is the machine that relays Usenet (Network News) news to your machine via UUCP or some other transport. Without it, this program is absolutely pointless.
ToadNews Software Requirements
• A news transport (like UUCP OR Slurp).
For UUCP news transports, I highly recommend Dave Platt's UUPC 3.0, available from any good FTP site or BBS (such as sumex-aim.stanford.edu or mac.archive.umich.edu). If you choose not to use UUCP, then MacSlurp will suffice as well.
Since ToadNews does not handle the transport of newsbatches from your newsfeed to your Mac, it is up to the news transport to perform this job. If you don't have a transport yet, you can get a copy of UUPC 3.0 or MacSlurp from MOST good BBS's or well stocked FTP sites. You must have the news transport running properly before you try to use ToadNews -- after all whats the point without any news to work on.
• …or, a Unix shell account, and uqwk, a Unix-based SOUP packet generator that collects news online and packages it up for downloading. Once these packets have been generated, the user can download to his/her Mac and process them using ToadNews.
• A Usenet newsreader (or very flexible text-editor). Usenet news is most easily read with a newsreader. Newsreaders provide great user-interfaces for posting and reading Usenet news. Two such newsreaders are Roy Wood's “rnMac”, and Bill Cramer's “TheNews”. See the addendum on ToadNews-compatible software.
Recommended Readings
If you are using UUPC 3.0, please read all the accompaning documentation! It is a very complex program and you should configure it properly before you start using ToadNews.
A fantastic book which talks in general about using your Macintosh and the Internet (of which Usenet is a part) is Adam Engst's book, “The Internet Starter Kit For Macintosh”, published by Hayden Books. There is a complete chapter in the book that deals with configuring ToadNews and related Usenet software for the Mac. I highly recommend it to novice users (or those who just wish to find out more about the Internet).
If you don't know a lot about UNIX or Usenet you should get hold of a couple of books called “Managing UUCP and Usenet” and “Using UUCP and Usenet”. These are great books which are REQUIRED reading if you want to firmly establish yourself as a Usenet and UUCP guru. These two books are by published by:
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
981 Chestnut Street
Newton, MA 02164
USA
If you still have problems I recommend that you send E-mail to the system operator (root) of the machine that you intend to get news from (your newsfeed). Please read all of your documentation before asking for help, since these people are usually doing this in their spare time and with limited resources.
