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

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)]

> 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?

Well, ihnp4 *was* the phone company :-),  So the long distance bill
was "funny money" at the corporate level.  I don't know how they
justified the soft expense internally, though.

Most of the mid-80s long haul was 1200bps dialup.  If you look at
the UUCP maps there were two obvious tiers of sites: the backbone,
and everyone else.  The backbone carried most of the long haul
traffic, and was homed at universities and large corporations that
could justify the budget for the phone bills.  One of those sites
was 'alberta', a VAX at the U of Alberta comp. sci. department.
The long distances charges were funded out of one of the professor's
(Tony Marsland?) research budgets.

The backbone sites then re-distributed the traffic on a more local
basis.  In Edmonton, 'alberta' handled most of the long distance
traffic, then fed it to 'ncc' (a node I ran). 'ncc' handled
much of the fanout to the other local UUCP nodes, with 'alberta'
picking up the rest.  'ncc' also handled a small amount of long
distance traffic.  'alberta' also had a Datapac (X.25) connection,
and used that to exchange traffic with UBC and another site out
east (Waterloo?).

This sort of setup was very typical of the regional hub and spoke
deployments across the continent.

--ncc!lyndon