[ih] Early Internet history

[Dr Eberhard W Lisse]

After Namibia’s independence calls to South Africa remained VERY cheap for a while and only gradually increased. So I dialled Grahamstown with UUPC at first and later managed to have the local University absorb calls to Pretoria from their Olivetti (!) box.

Then Linux appeared and Taylor/UUCP with long and sliding packets. We then found an early version of smail making gzipping and batching possible which together made this very efficient.

Once I figured out M4 I could set up sendmail up to do this in 9 lines :-)-O and when we had enough “paying” users to cross the leased lime threshold it took them a week or so to figure out that mails took minutes instead of hours :-)-O


I still like (Taylor) UUCP and it might actually be more efficient over satellite phones than doing this over TCP/IP, especially if one could hack up something dropping all attachments and rejecting messages over a certain size to block circumvention :-)-O

This might actually be helpful in disaster recovery :-)-O

el

Sent from Dr Lisse’s iPad mini 4
On 6 Jul 2018, 22:41 +0100, John Levine , wrote:
> 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
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