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

[Johan Helsingius]

Then there was "UUCP over floppy disks". When I did my military service
back in the 1980s in Finland, I was the only person on the base that
had their own PC - but no unauthorized phone connections were allowed
(this was before mobile phones). Every time I got home leave, I would
copy the outgoing queue directory to floppy disks, giving me a batch
update of email and USENET.

The reason I got away with my own PC was because I had a special
position, reporting directly to the base commander. At one point
there was a reunion of all of us who had held that special job
(basically a base ombuds), and I discovered who had held the job
for the first time at the base I was at. It was Nils Torvalds,
journalist, politician and past member of the European Parliament,
and father of Linus...

	Julf


On 22/04/2025 19:38, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via 
Internet-history wrote:
> 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
>> --
>> Internet-history mailing list
>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>>
>>
>