[ih] Early Internet history

[Johan Helsingius]

On 06/07/18 19:33, Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond wrote:

 > 2. My understanding of USENET is that it was not a network as such,
 > but most people referred to it as the system of newsgroups using a
 > clever hierarchy and peer to peer for dissemination (NNTP). Again,
 > it was a store and forward network, this time using the UUCP suite
 > and dial-up.

I still remember running the USENET node for Finland over an
X.25 connection to mcvax in Amsterdam. Charged by the packet.
On a Zilog Z8000 machine, running their version of System III UNIX.
Just like many of us, the Zilog engineers noticed the discrepancy
between the documentation and code in the termios TTY interface.
Unlike everybody else, they thought the documentation was right
and code wrong, and "fixed" the code. As a result, if there was any
delay in the packet stream, the tty driver would time out and return
"0 characters read" - the UNIX convention for End of File. So UUCP
would hang up. Great, if you just had transferred 45 K of a 48K binary
posting - and were paying per packet. :(

     Julf