[ih] bang paths, was Domain Names

[Craig Partridge]

Ah this brings back fun memories.

My favorite one of this score was princeton.  There was a princeton.bitnet
and princeton.csnet and they were not connected to each other.  The story
(perhaps apocryphal) was that the sys admins would meet once a week to swap
mag tapes of misdirected email.

Craig
(one of the techies who ran the CSNET relay in the 1980s).

> 
> On Jan 20, 2010, at 2:55 PM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
> 
> > On 1/20/2010 8:37 AM, Craig Partridge wrote:
> >> The assimilation of USENET (and CSNET and to a lesser degree BITNET) into
> >> ARPANET was intentionally enabled...
> > 
> > Each of these had their own syntax.
> 
> 
> One of the challenging things in the 1980s was getting mail from one network 
> to another.   Figuring out how to manually route through gateways was somethi
> ng of a black art -- and often not officially sanctioned... as mail loads got
>  heavier, sometimes postmasters would ask for people to stop using their conn
> ections.   
> 
> At the time, getting a connection to ARPAnet was still quite a non-trivial pr
> ocess; apart from the large research universities very few places had a circu
> it.   CSNET and BITNET both helped fill that gap since NSF approval wasn't re
> quired.  In the case of BITNET all a site needed was an IBM system running VM
>  (or a VAX which could speak the IBM RSCS protocol), and a friendly partner w
> ho would accept a leased line connection.   The ARPAnet had already solved th
> e HOSTS.TXT problem by moving to DNS, but BITNET maintained a flat file of al
> l connected hosts (and their peers) which was updated manually; routing was h
> andled by RSCS, no explicit path knowledge was needed by the sender or appear
> ed in the mail header (user at node sufficed).  UUCP relied on explicit path rou
> ting ("bang paths": e.g. !rutgers!decwrl!user) until pathalias [1] became wid
> espread and addresses of the form user at node.uucp were supported.
> 
> There was a mailing list dedicated to network topics known as INFO-NETS hoste
> d at MIT.    After about a year of research I had a fairly complete map showi
> ng all the mail gateways.   As a point of historical interest in 1991 I sent 
> a copy to John Quarterman and it appeared in Matrix News (Volume 1, Number 6;
>  September 1991).
> 
> The "well known" gateways were also well-connected and on multiple networks. 
>   Typically they had mailers which could reliably parse addresses, rewrite he
> aders as needed, and get mail moving on to the next hop.    Manually routed m
> ail could use the percent routing hack, quoted components, source routing, or
>  weird combinations of all of them at once.    It was really pretty amazing s
> ome of the stuff that would work.  Lots of people in that era became sendmail
>  wizards (often against their will!).  On any given network, people knew the 
> host of last resort by heart... you'd hear lots of "just send it to (ucbvax, 
> wiscvm, ihnp4), they can probably get it there".
> 
> A whacky example: Mail from a MAILNET connected host to someone inside DEC (r
> outed via their UUCP connection):   
> "rutgers!decvax!decwrl!KYOA::USER"%rutgers.arpa at mit-multics.mailnet
> 
> Some well-connected sites included:  Cal Berkeley (UCBVAX, UCBARPA, BERKELEY)
>  [ARPA, UUCP], Univ. Delaware (UDEL-RELAY) [ARPA, CSNET], Univ. of Wisconsin 
> (WISCVM) [ARPA, BITNET], DEC Western Research Lab (DECWRL, DECVAX) [ARPA, CSN
> ET, UUCP], AT&T Bell Labs at Naperville, IL (ihnp4.uucp) [UUCP], Rutgers (RUT
> GERS) [ARPA, UUCP], 
> 
> Up until the early 1990s, it was still difficult to get on "the network".   M
> any sites were still relying on the simplest way to move mail, which was UUCP
> .  It wasn't until the NSF Acceptable Use Policy was lifted and the regional 
> and independent networks were available (e.g. PSInet), that moving packets be
> came straightforward.
> 
> On a related topic: People had lots of fun on internal networks coming up wit
> h host naming schemes.   It was one of the best parts about being the systems
>  person.  I recall MIT has breakfast cereals for awhile (MIT-RICECHEX).  Rutg
> ers main machines were colors (RU-RED, RU-BLUE, RU-GREEN).  When I set up the
>  namespace at South Pole Station, all the hosts were named after the one thin
> g you'd never see: trees.
> 
> A great reference on the history of various networks and how they all worked 
> together is John Quarterman's "The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing
>  Systems Worldwide", Digital Press, 1996, ISBN 1555580335.  I'm not sure if J
> ohn is on the list.
> 
> Some more mail gateways from 1985:
> 
> ARPA-UUCP: brl-tgr, ucbvax, berkeley, seismo
> ARPA-ACSNET (Australia): seismo.arpa
> ARPA-AUGMENT (Xerox): office.arpa
> ARPA-Xerox: xerox.arpa
> ARPA-CSNET: csnet-relay.arpa, csnet-sh.arpa, csnet-cic.arpa
> ARPA-BITNET: wiscvm.bitnet, ucbvax.arpa
> ARPA-DEC (Digital Equip. Corp.): decwrl.arpa
> ARPA-CCNET (Columbia Univ): columbia.arpa, cu20xx.arpa
> ARPA-MAILNET: mit-multics.arpa
> ARPA-JANET (U.K.): ucl-cs.arpa
> CSNET-UUCP: tektronix.csnet, tektronix.uucp
> CSNET-DFN (Univ. Karlshruhe, Germany): germany.csnet
> CSNET-XEROX: xerox.csnet
> CSNET-HUJI (Herbrew Univ., Jerusalum, Israel): israel.csnet
> CSNET-SDN (Seoul, Korea): kaist.csnet
> CSNET-MTSNET (Univ. of Michigan): umich.csnet
> CSNET-DEC (Digital Equip. Corp.): decwrl.csnet
> CSNET-EAN (Canada): ubc.csnet
> CSNET-SUNET (Swedish Univ. Network): CHALMERS.CSNET
> CSNET-JANET (U.K.): ucl-cs.csnet
> BITNET-UUCP: psuvax1.bitnet, psuvax1.uucp
> BITNET-CSNET: wiscvm.bitnet
> BITNET-IBM (IBM Research): vnet.bitnet, cunyvm.bitnet
> BITNET-NETNORTH (Canada): canada01.bitnet
> BITNET-CCNET (Columbia Univ.): cuvma.bitnet
> BITNET-EARN (European Academic Research Network, via GSI Darmstadt): dearn.bi
> tnet
> MAILNET-JANET (U.K.): ucl-cs-mailnet.mailnet
> MAILNET-CCNET (Columbia Univ.): carnegie.mailnet
> MAILNET-MTSNET (Univ. of Michigan): umich-mts.mailnet
> JANET (U.K.)-PSS (U.K.-British Telecom PDN): pssa.pss
> JANET (U.K.)-UUCP: dcl-cs.uucp, !seismo!mcvax!ukc!icdoc!dcl-cs!davis
> ACSNET (Australia)-UUCP: !decvax!mulga!psych.uq.oz
> DEC-UUCP: decwrl.uucp
> 
> [1] http://www.uucp.org/papers/pathalias.pdf
> 
> 
********************
Craig Partridge
Chief Scientist, BBN Technologies
E-mail: craig at aland.bbn.com or craig at bbn.com
Phone: +1 517 324 3425