[ih] uucp, was Question re rate of growth of the Arpanet

[John R. Levine]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2025, Craig Partridge wrote:
> According to the wikipedia page (which could be wrong), the pioneering
> Telebit Trailblazer didn't show up until 1985, by which time USENIX/UUCP
> was already quite big.  So something else must have been in place before
> then -- or was the fact that ihnp4 was willing to run up a huge phone tab
> hide many issues?

I think that's it.  We used what we could use, from 300 to 1200 and then 
V.32 9600 until Telebit came along.  We also learned a lot about what 
phone exchanges were in the free local calling area.  One summer I was at 
my beach house on Long Beach Island in NJ and I saw that even though the 
FAA's Tech Center west of Atlantic City was 40 miles away, it was a 
local call and I talked their uucp admin into giving me a usenet feed for 
a month.

Telebit had an ISA card version which had an unbuffered UART that lost 
characters if the interrupts weren't handled fast enough.  Fortunately 
there was a pin-compatible buffered UART and in those days the boards were 
simple enough that I could unsolder the old UART and put in a socket 
without damaging the board.  I think everyone who got the ISA card did 
that.

R's,
John


>
> Side note: the web page also noted that Telebit was founded by Paul Baran
> (small world department).
>
> Craig
>
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 8:24 AM John Levine via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>
>> It appears that Johan Helsingius via Internet-history <julf at Julf.com>
>> said:
>>> On 21/04/2025 22:15, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
>>> Internet-history wrote:
>>>
>>>> then there was UUCP... can anyone chime in what the "minimum" acceptable
>>>> bit rate for that was?  anything less than Bell 202 at 1.2 or Racal
>> Vadic
>>>> at 2.4?
>>>
>>> Pretty much, yes. Leaf nodes could survive on a 1200 bps connection,
>>> but I don't think I ever saw anything slower.
>>
>> I think I set up a 300 bps leaf node but didn't run much traffic over it.
>>
>> All the serious uucp nodes used Telebit modems that had special support
>> for uucp
>> and could run about 14K bps over a regular phone line. I believe that was
>> the
>> best you could do until the era of 56K modems that cheated by connecting
>> directly to digital trunks.