Before the mid 90s and the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web, if you were British and living or travelling abroad, it was very difficult to find out what was happening in your home country. If you were lucky then you might buy an English newspaper and read news that was two or three days old.
By the early 1980s, Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC or simply Digital) had created a worldwide network of minicomputers for its employees. DEC employed many, very innovative software engineers. Some relocated from England to New England in the north east of the USA and missed news of home.
In 1981, Richard De Morgan, based in Reading, England, started sending UK news to his colleagues in Nashua, New Hampshire, USA and called it the VOGON News Service or the VNS. Over the next few years, this became a global news service, circulated within DEC and often forwarded outside of DEC. It ran for over sixteen years between 1981 and at least up until December 1997. Digital was sold to Compaq in 1998.
Click here to read the full story of the VOGON News Service.
At its peak in 1989-1993, the VNS had over 7,000 direct email subscribers within Digital, over 4,000 readers using DEC VTX and an unknown number outside of Digital.
This website provides background about the VNS. The menu choices at the top of the screen allow you to read a history of the VNS and to read about the innovative software technology that enabled it to work. The sidebar on the right shows a selection of issues. Note that the VNS was produced in the days of text-only terminals. It is best to view these issues on a wide screen, not on a smartphone or even on a smaller tablet.
The picture below shows the world-wide readership in January 1993 when the distribution was to 7257 Readers on 1445 Nodes at 273 Sites in 213 Towns in 36 Countries. Click on the map to open an interactive Google map that also shows the various servers that were used to take the VNS around the world.
History of the VOGON News Service 