# History of WinVN

WinVN began at home as an own-time project by Mark Riordan, a systems programmer at Michigan State University. Serious development of WinVN began in September 1989 and continued in fits and starts. A Macintosh version was developed, but it is no longer in sync with the latest Windows version. The recent release of a number of good Macintosh news readers stopped the development of a version of WinVN for the Mac. The MS Windows based WinVN program and its source code were placed in the public domain in 1991.

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.

In July 1993, John Cooper 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.

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.

This version has been maintained by Mark Spankus and is available at http://www.marks-lab.com

See List of Contributors.