THE USENET COOKBOOK (Recipes and food lorefromthe global village) Acollection by the readers of USENET,from the newsgroup alt.gourmand. Edited by Brian K. Reid Palo Alto, California, U.S.A. decwrl!reid [email protected] Last updated 1989-ish. Typeset 13 September 2012 Copyright © 1989 USENET Community Trust Permission to copywithout fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advan- tage, the USENET copyright notice, title, and publi- cation date appear,and notice is giventhat copying is by permission of the USENET Community Trust. 1 INTRODUCTION(M) INTRODUCTION(M) The newelectronic interdependence recreates the world in the image ofaglobal village. —Marshall McLuhan, 1967 INTRODUCTION This is a community cookbook, from an invisible worldwide electronic community.Likeall community cookbooks, it has the favorite recipes of the members of the community,suitably edited and organized. The USENET Cookbook is a collection of the favorite recipes of USENET readers worldwide. USENET USENET is the network by which Unix computer users talk to each other.Itisaworldwide net, made from computer-to-computer telephone links, linking some 500,000 people at 7,000 sites in 30 countries. Besides serving an obvious technical and scientific purpose, USENET is also a medium for linking worldwide social groups of people who share common interests. As an experiment in interactive electronic publica- tion, some members of USENET decided in 1985 to makeacookbook of favorites from their ‘‘global vil- lage’’. Brian Reid of DEC Western Research in Palo Alto, California, organized the venture and wrote much of the requisite software. The USENET Cookbook is a database and not just a book. The paper copythat you are holding was printed from a copyofthe online database at some USENET site, but evenasyou are reading it, newrecipes are being added to that database. The USENET Cookbook is distributed with software that enables every user to makehis own customized edition of it, leaving out the recipes that he has no interest in, and perhaps adding a fewofhis own that he hasn’tyet submitted to the network. There will be manydifferent versions and editions of it, all with the same title, and all copyrighted. Every user can choose whether to print the recipes in imperial units (cups and spoons) or in metric units. DISTRIBUTION The USENET Cookbook is distributed in the newsgroup named alt.gourmand.Itisa‘‘moderated’’news- group, which means that everything published in it must be approvedbythe moderator (editor). Readers submit recipes electronically by mailing them to the editor.Heedits for style, form, and content, and per- forms conversion to or from metric units if necessary.The finished recipes are published in weekly batches, which are sent from Palo Alto every Thursday. PROCEDURE To participate, you will need to get alt.gourmand at your site. A package of software for using it is posted from time to time into alt.gourmand.Get that software and install it on your machine; it will enable you to save recipes easily and to print cookbooks from them. To submit a recipe to the USENET Cookbook,mail its text to the newsgroup moderator, {sun,pyramid,ucb- vax,decvax,ames,hplabs}!decwrl!recipes (uucp) or [email protected] (internet). The news soft- ware at most sites will do this automatically if you try to post to alt.gourmand. It’simportant that you tell us where you got the recipe from. It’sokifyou cribbed it from a book or maga- zine or newspaper,but if you copythe words that you found there, you have probably violated a copyright. Copyright lawiscomplex, and only a lawyer can reliably advise you on whether or not you are violating it, butingeneral if you rewrite a recipe, in your own words, evenifyou don’tchange the formula, then you are not infringing the copyright by submitting that recipe to the network. The copyright is on the words that explain the recipe, and not the recipe itself. COPYRIGHT The entire USENET Cookbook is copyright by the USENET Community Trust, which is a California organization formed for the purpose of holding the copyright. The purpose of this copyright is to prevent commercialization of the Cookbook. Read the copyright notice on the title page. USENET Cookbook alt.gourmand 27 Jun 1986 1 COOKBOOK(1) COOKBOOK(1) NAME cookbook: rckeep, rckeepnew, rcbook.t, rcbook.n, rctypeset, rcnroff−Store and print the alt.gourmand USENET Cookbook SYNOPSIS rckeep < filename copies a recipe to your keep directory s|rckeep (same thing, from a news-reading program.) rckeepnew [ directory ] finds and keeps newrecipes rcbook.t [ −t ] [ −m ] [ −M ] [ −f ] typesets a cookbook from kept recipes rcbook.n [ −m ] [ −M ] nroffs a cookbook from kept recipes rctypeset [ −m ] [ −M ] [ −f ] typesets one recipe from std input rcnroff [ −m ] [ −M ] nroffs one recipe from std input rcnew.t [ −m ] [ −M ] [ −f ] typesets newkept recipes rcnew.n [ −m ] [ −M ] nroffs newkept recipes DESCRIPTION The USENET Cookbook is an online database distributed in the alt.gourmand newsgroup. This software makes it easy for you to clip recipes that interest you, to store them in your own directory,and to make printed cookbooks from those stored recipes. SAVING RECIPES ONE ATATIME Read the news with your favorite news reading program. If you don’thav e afavorite, try rn. When you see arecipe that interests you, type s|rckeep The ‘‘s’’command means ‘‘save’’;the vertical bar means ‘‘save into a program’’. rckeep is the program that keeps recipes. It will save recipes into a directory named Recipes, and it will create that directory for you if it does not currently exist. If you would likerecipes savedinsome other place, you can type s|rckeep PartyRecipes s|rckeep ˜/PartyRecipes s|rckeep /usr/local/lib/Recipes and so forth. SAVING NEW RECIPES AUTOMATICALLY If you don’twant to takethe time and trouble to run rckeep on every recipe, you can run rckeepnew from time to time. When rckeepnew is run, it looks in the netnews spooling directory to find the files that hold the articles that hold the recipes, and automatically runs rckeep on every file that contains a recipe and that has arrivedsince the last time you ran rckeepnew.Like rckeep, rckeepnew can be giventhe name of a directory to use as the keep directory: rckeepnew or rckeepnew /usr/local/lib/Recipes and so forth. HOWRECIPES ARE STORED Every recipe is givena code word by the editor of alt.gourmand. That code word is contained in the first fewlines of the article body.The rckeep and rckeepnew programs use that code word as a file name in your keep directory.For example, if you are saving a recipe whose 1-line description is PHEASANT-PERRY−Pheasant for Thanksgiving it will be savedinyour keep directory under the filename ‘‘pheasant-perry’’. These filenames are forced to lower case by rckeep. MAKING A COOKBOOK To typeset a cookbook, just type rcbook.t and all of the recipes in your keep directory will be typeset in alphabetical order,with an index, introduc- tion, and title page added. Theywill come out either in English units (cups and teaspoons) or in metric units (grams and deciliters) depending on howthe alt.gourmand software has been installed at your site. If you want to print the cookbook in cups and spoons regardless of what the software installer did, then type rcbook.t −M and if you want to print the cookbook in metric units regardless of what the software installer did, then type rcbook.t −m If you don’thav e atypesetter or if you don’thav e the troff(1) program, then use ‘‘rcbook.n’’ instead; it USENET Cookbook 12 Sep 87 1 COOKBOOK(1) COOKBOOK(1) uses nroff(1). and sends the results of the formatting to standard output. It supports the same −m and −M options that rcbook.t does. If you have more than one keep directory,for specialty cookbooks of different types, you can give rcbook a directory name as an argument, e.g.: rcbook.t /usr/local/lib/Recipes Youcan capture the output of rcbook.t in a file by using the ‘‘−t’’option: rcbook.t −t > FormattedFile PRINTING ONE RECIPE The program rctypeset typesets one recipe, from its standard input. It is able to discard news and mail headers from the beginning of the recipe; you may use rctypeset on a netnews message in the form that it is stored in a spooling directory,oryou may use it directly from a news-reading program. rctypeset supports the metric (−m) and non-metric (−M) options explained above. The program rcnroff performs the same function as rctypeset,except that it formats to standard output instead of to the typesetter. PRINTING NEW RECIPES It is a nuisance to keep track of which recipes you have printed and which you have not. It is expensive and slowtoprint the entire cookbook every time a fewmore recipes arrive.The rcnew.t program works very much like rcbook.t,except that it typesets only those recipes that were put into the keep directory after the last time you ran rcnew.t.Itproduces a complete newindex, though. It uses the creation time of the file INDEX in your current directory to determine the last time you created an index, which is presumably the last time you ran rcbook.t or rcnew.t. rcnew.t supports the metric (−m) and non-metric (−M) options explained above. The program rcnew.ndoes the same thing as rcnew.t, except that it formats to standard output instead of to the typesetter. THE INDEX The cookbook indexisa‘‘permuted index’’. This means that each recipe is indexedbyevery major word in its title.