[ih] Early Internet history

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 07/07/2018 06:53, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
>> 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.

EUNET in Europe was the UUCP setup, starting formally in 1982, which in
due time migrated from UUCP-over-dialup to UUCP-over-TCP/IP. Its HQ was
in Amsterdam and was a large part of why RIPE also grew up in Amsterdam.
The best source, I think, is a section in:
A History of International Research Networking: the People who Made it
Happen, Howard Davies & Beatrice Bressan (ed), ISBN: 978-3-527-32710-2,
Wiley, 2010.

Personally I was using UUCP email between Switzerland and New Zealand
in ~1984, well before SMTP was available on that path. We saw either
MCVAX (in Amsterdam) or UNIDO (in Dortmund) in most bang paths
from CERNVAX.

    Brian