[ih] Early Internet history

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> That's a good point.  I too remember USENET as referring more to the 
> newsgroups than to uucp transport.

Yes, Usenet was the collection of newsgroups, originally shipped over 
UUCP.

> Do I recall correctly that "uunet" was the term used to denote the 
> network of machines that could be reached by bang path addressing?

No, 'uunet' was a commercial UUCP hub, started up by Rick Adams.  It 
handled a great volume of mail and news traffic, as well as an extensive 
public file archive.  It eventually morphed into Alternet, one of the 
very first commercial Internet providers.

As for the collection of hosts relaying mail over UUCP, we always referred 
to it as "the UUCP network."  It was all very adhoc, with many private 
links.  When we talked about "the UUCP network" it generally referred to 
the hosts exchanging mail as defined in the monthly UUCP maps, published 
in the comp.mail.maps newsgroup.

--lyndon