The VOGON News Service

Between 27 March 1992 and 9 January 1995, over 400 issues of the VOGON News were posted to the newsgroup soc.culture.british. Click here to search the newsgroup for posts relating to VNS.

This is a summary:

On 30 October 1990, Craig Cockburn posted on the newsgroup soc.culture.british in response to a discussion about the lack of British news available to ex-pats.

This is Craig’s post:

Hi,
Well, a few years ago, people outside Digital could subscribe
to the Vogon News Service (VNS). This publication came out Mon-Fri
and currently has over 8400 subscribers worldwide. Unfortunately, the
powers that be within Digital decided that messages going "automatically"
to external addresses was not allowed. As such, you cannot subscribe to
Vogon news if you don't work for Digital, nor can an address be set up
on Digitals network to send VNS onto external subscribers. Don't blame
me for this, I don't make the rules !!

Vogon news covers news from the Reading (England) area, the UK,
Worldwide, Computer News, Technology update and Sports news. However,
you need to work for Digital to subscribe !

I enquired with the editor of VNS however, and he said it is OK for
individuals inside Digital to "manually" forward VNS to individuals outside
Digital. So, if you know someone inside Digital who gets VNS, then you
can ask them to forward you their copy.

* please dont ask me to do this - I have more than enough to keep me
* busy at the moment !!! *

As a long term solution, perhaps someone out there could set up a similar
service? VNS is compiled by several people, who each concentrate on one
section of the 'paper' ie. Main news, Technology update, Computer news,
sport etc. By dividing the work in this manner, it isn't too much of
a load on any one individual. As a result, VNS is frequently around 16K+
each day !

Hope this helps.

Craig worked for Digital in Reading and his node, MARVIN, was in the same cluster as VOGON.

On 27 March 1992, Craig sent VNS 2544, the first of many issues of VNS, to the newsgroup adding:

Here is the news on Friday, 27th March 1992.
Welcome to the Vogon News Service !
The VNS is so called because when it started up over 10 years ago,
it was sent from a node called VOGON (from the Hitch-hiker's guide to
the galaxy by Douglas Adams).
VNS used to be distributed externally to Digital, I have received
permission to restart this service. Please do not ask to subscribe
to VNS - automatic subscriptions via e-mail are not allowed.

Future VNS postings will be to soc.culture.british only.

Craig.

Issue 2544 was the first issue sent to the newsgroup.

In May 1992, Gwyn Evans took over from Craig for a few weeks before continuing posting on the newsgroup until 9 January 1995 when he posted:

NOTE:
Just to expand on the header, VNS as forwarded by me, will shortly be
stopping. Looking back, I've been forwarding it for over two years now
but recently, there are two problems that I can't do anything about.
The first is that the news just isn't getting through to me, which
is why it's been patchy/non-existant for the last few months and the
second is that the group to I work for in Digital has been sold off
to MTI, so very shortly I'll not have access to VNS nor the rest of
the Digital network...

Bye for now,
Gwyn

Issue 3227 was the last issue posted to the newsgroup.

On 10 March 1995, Jonathan Monahan posted to the newsgroup:

Hello,
I posted a note a while ago now asking for information on VOGON News Service. Obviously, no-one knows anything about it as I haven't heard a jot, or seen a reply in this group.
So, is there are possible replacement (ie. any other summary daily news service for the UK and World which is delivered my email) ?

Thanks,
Jonathan.

Which received the following reply from Gwyn Evans:

Well, what it originally was was a mailing list run by Digital employees
in the UK who mailed snippets of UK news/sports info to Digital expats
abroad. This grew into a regular news feed, mailed out from a node
called VOGON::, on Digital's internal network, hence VNS.

IIRC, Craig Cockburn started posting the UK News & Sport sections here
for a while before I took over. After a little more time I started
mailing it off to a distribution list and a Cardiff newsgroup, where it
was picked by RobH's script and placed on the WWW. Since then however,
the group I work for has left Digital and thus I no longer get VNS and
can't forward it anywhere...

Gwyn

The newsgroup contains a number of responses from readers of VNS including this on 22 May 1992:

Apologies for being boring, but I just wanted to thank publicly those who
produce the VNS news. Much appreciated in this corner of a peculiarly insular country in which the network TV news generally consists of Lotto results, golf tournaments and "how many signatures has Perot got this week!!????" (the newspapers, with a few notable but expensive exceptions, are about the same).
One thing - please do continue to quote the USD/GBP exchange rate since this information is not readily available here (local banks are amazed that Tesco doesn't take dollar bills!).
Thanks again.

Simon King 
Dept. Chem. Eng. & Mat. Sci., 
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.