In 1992, Sam Rushing and Jim Dumoulin, of the NASA/Kennedy Space Center Information Systems Branch, selected WinVN as a good candidate for future development as part of the Payload Data Management System (PDMS-II) project. After contacting Mark Riordan, NASA agreed to make extensive enhancements to WinVN, coordinate a public domain Internet development effort to extend its features, and to serve as the overall integrator for future versions of WinVN. Sam Rushing reworked WinVN to support the emerging Windows TCP/IP Sockets standard (WINSOCK), revamped the user interface and added support for threading and XOVER (a faster extension to the news transport protocol).
In July 1993, John Cooper of FineLine Software, Inc. approached the WinVN team with a number of bug fixes and enhancement ideas. John’s work soon evolved into a broad restructuring of the WinVN interface and communication engine. John also implemented a series of new advanced features including MIME attachments, intelligent integrated decoding, and a flexible customizable interface. FineLine Software offers a commercially supported version of WinVN for those companies that need a level of support not typically available in Public Domain software.
Over the years, many other people, in a truly international effort spanning 4 continents, have contributed their own time and energy to the success of WinVN. They include, but are not limited to:
Original Author: Mark Riordan mrr@scss3.cl.msu.edu Major Authors/System Integrators: Sam Rushing rushing@titan.ksc.nasa.gov Jim Dumoulin dumoulin@titan.ksc.nasa.gov John S. Cooper jcooper@planetz.com Contributing Authors: Matt Bretherton MBretherton@cmutual.com.au Jody Glasser jglas@tdycont.com Conor Nolan cnolan@tcd.ie Michael Finken finken@conware.de Harvey Brydon brydon@tulsa.dowell.slb.com Don Gardener gardnerd@keystone.ksc.nasa.gov Masaki Ishido ishidou@yhp.hp.com Michael Downs mdowns@eos.arc.nasa.gov Jim Martin jim@noc.rutgers.edu Roger Pearse pearse_w_r@bt-web.bt.co.uk Tom Menshik tmenshik@hpcvitlm.cv.hp.comWinVN is in the Public Domain and the latest versions for both MS Windows and Windows/NT (both the source and binaries) are available free of charge via anonymous FTP from FTP.KSC.NASA.GOV in the directory [pub.win3.winvn].
Questions can be sent to the developers via the mailing list "winvn@titan.ksc.nasa.gov" and anyone that wishes to join the developer's list (or see a constant stream of E-mail messages from people attempting to configure WinVN) can send a message to "majordomo@news.ksc.nasa.gov" with a message body of "Subscribe WINVN". The mailing list is also gatewayed to the MAIL.WINVN newsgroup on the server NEWS.KSC.NASA.GOV.
Another Internet based support mechanism includes the WinVN Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file compiled and maintained by Greg Monroe (monroe@acpub.duke.edu) from Duke University. This file is periodically posted to various news groups and is also available on WinVN FTP sites. Also, Mike Downs of the Kennedy Space Center Information Systems Office has developed a World Wide Web (WWW) Home page for the WinVN project which will be available at the time 1.0 is released. (URL = “http:\\www.ksc.nasa.gov\software\winvn\winvn.html”).