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

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

let's not forget the UUCP 't' protocol which effectuated a "via Internet
long-distance TPC UUCP bypass/transit" :D, viz.:

"The `t' protocol is intended for TCP links. It does no error checking or
flow control, and requires an eight bit clear channel.

I believe the `t' protocol originated in BSD versions of UUCP.

The Taylor UUCP code for the `t' protocol is in `prott.c'.

When a UUCP package transmits a command, it first gets the length of the
command string, c. It then sends ((c / 512) + 1) * 512 bytes (the smallest
multiple of 512 which can hold c bytes plus a null byte) consisting of the
command string itself followed by trailing null bytes.

When a UUCP package sends a file, it sends it in blocks. Each block
contains at most 1024 bytes of data. Each block consists of four bytes
containing the amount of data in binary (most significant byte first, the
same format as used by the Unix function htonl) followed by that amount of
data. The end of the file is signalled by a block containing zero bytes of
data."
https://www.math.utah.edu/docs/info/uucp_5.html

g

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 9:55 AM Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> > 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
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-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True