Newswatcher, a usenet newsreader application originally created by
Steve Falkenburg and then re-written by John Norstad, perhaps better
known for creating the widely used anti-vir program for the classic
Mac OS, [Disinfectant][1].

NewsWatcher eventually became Open Sourced, which helped spawn several
spin-offs (see links below)

> In the early days, I used Harry Chelsey's "[NetNews][2]" HyperCard
> stack to read Usenet news (before that, I used UNIX readers). It was
> slow and clumsy due to the inherent limitations of HyperCard, but
> very nicely designed. Then Steve Falkenburg, a new Apple engineer
> fresh out of the University of Michigan (the hot school for young
> Mac programmers), wrote a program named "NewsWatcher". Although the
> basic design was very nice, and the program was reasonably robust
> and more than usable, it was very crude, and it was never really
> intended to be a production program. For example, it didn't even do
> word wrap! Mac folks on the network were so desperate, however, that
> they began to use it anyway. So did I.
>
> NewsWatcher worked just fine until one day in the spring of 1992,
> when it suddenly broke (it crashed on launch) because our full group
> list at NU grew too big, and it exceeded a limit in the program. I
> was very busy, and didn't really have the time, but I just couldn't
> live without the program. I definitely couldn't face the ugly
> prospect of returning to using the incredibly obtuse UNIX readers.
> The NetNews stack had stopped working long ago for the same reason -
> too much data for HyperCard's tiny little brain. So I decided to
> take just a day or two and go into the code and fix that one
> problem.
>
> Famous last words. I got hooked. I started an enormous project which
> lasted for over 3 1/2 years enhancing NewsWatcher. I rewrote all of
> Steve's original code, and I added billions of features. The work
> went well, if slowly, and I was happy with the result. NewsWatcher
> become enormously popular on the net, and I started getting even
> more mail about it than I did about Disinfectant and viruses, which
> was quite an accomplishment. In the fall of 1995 I finally got tired
> of spending all my spare time on NewsWatcher. I retired from the
> project. I decided it was time to move on to new projects and new
> areas of computing.
>
> I've always believed strongly in the value of sharing source code
> with other programmers. That's how I learned to program. As I worked
> on NewsWatcher, I made my source code freely available on the
> Internet, and many other programmers used it to produce enhanced
> versions. Brian Clark's "Yet Another NewsWatcher" and Simon Fraser's
> "Multi-Threaded NewsWatcher" are major derived versions which became
> very popular. I was thrilled to see my work live on and be improved
> by these other talented programmers.
>
> ? Excerpt: [John Norstad's Autobiography][3] ?Web Archive

Note: NewsWatcher's [GNKSA certification:][4] By the time version 2.2
had made it's debut, this prestigious usenet seal of approval had been
granted to NewsWatcher.

If anyone has a newer version of NewsWatcher by John Norstad please
add it to this page.

 * Old downloads page for [NewsWatcher and other programs][5] (Web Archive - FTP downloads are unavailable).

See Also: [MT-NewsWatcher][6] | [YA-NewsWatcher][7] |
[NewsWatcher-X][8] | [Thoth][9]

Compatibility
Architecture: 68k PPC

  [1]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/disinfectant
  [2]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/netnews-reader
  [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304075931/http://www.norstad.org/autobiography.html
  [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Netkeeping_Seal_of_Approval (About GNKSA the 'Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval' - on Wikipedia)
  [5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000919173758/http://charlotte.at.northwestern.edu/jln/progs.ssi
  [6]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/mt-newswatcher-3x
  [7]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/ya-newswatcher
  [8]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/newswatcher-x
  [9]: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/thoth