[ih] Early Internet history

[John Levine]

In article <CAC20D2Mb0GL0mB9_H_-L5UEoMmYrCjSUmwM6zzELjoqWxOQVzg at mail.gmail.com> you write:
>The UUCPnet grew incredibly fast because it was easy and reasonably cheap
>to attach ... but quickly the 'routing problem' emerged.  In traditional
>UNIX style, UUCP had been design without worrying about some problems --
>UUCP was thinking small scale so how mail (packets or whatever got there)
>was not an issue.  You did your own routing.

Right.  A lot of this involved hiding the phone bills in company overhead budgets,
or carefully figuring out what was a local call.  I have a beach house on Long Beach
Island in New Jersey, and careful reading of the first pages of the phone book revealed
that even though the Atlantic City airport was a long way away, quirks of geography
made it a local call, and the uucp node at the FAA tech center at the airport kindly
gave me a uucp feed for the summer.


> But with many, thousands of nodes, this was a huge problem.

>Netnews gets layered on top of UUCP and because of the growth, and the wild
>nature, this lack of support for routinr quickly becomes an issue.

Actually, for netnews it didn't matter since you flooded your news to
all your neighbors and it didn't matter what was multiple hops away.
The mapping project was for e-mail.

Everyone could use the route info to source route their uucp mail to
anyone else on the map.  Considering what a kludge it was, it worked pretty well,


R's,
John