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

[Clem Cole]

Lyndon,

May the record show, I release the 'e' protocol for ethernet and gave it to
Sam.
It used a Berkeley Socket, but it meant that you did not need to run
sendmail.

I wrote it for Masscomp weeks after I left Masscomp and was originally
implemented on 4.1C
Clem
ᐧ

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 3:19 PM Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> > 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.
>
> And down the protocol rabbit hole we go :-)  't' required an 8-bit
> error corrected in-order channel.  I.e. TCP.  AT&T independently
> created an almost identical protocol named 'e' for TCP (they were
> unaware of the 't' protocol from Berkeley).  Later, Taylor UUCP
> introduced the 'i' protocol, a full-duplex version of 't'.  Full
> duplex in the sense that it transfered files on both directions
> concurrently -- a huge time saving for sites that had bi-directional
> Usenet feeds (pre-NNTP).
>
> The 'f' protocol was designed for use over X.25 via X.28 PADs.  It
> encoded 8-bit data to fit in the 7-bit data channel, and escaped
> various control characters that were used by the PADs to control
> the terminal session.
>
> The original protocol was 'g'.  Somewhat similar to X.25's LAPB,
> in AT&T's uucp it defaulted to 64 byte packets with a window size
> of three.  But the protocol parameters allowed a window size up to
> 7 and a maximum packet size of 256 bytes IIRC.  Increasing both
> values really sped things up, but the Xenix UUCP impleentation
> had a bug that caused uucico to drop core if the remote tried to
> negotiate a window size > 3, and the AT&T uucico binary didn't
> let you change the window or packet size.  I'm pretty sure
> Honey DanBer did let you monkey with those settings.
>
> Honey DanBer also introduced the 'G' protocol.  It was mostly an
> enhanced 'g' with larger packet sizes, from what I remember.
>
> And there were several niche protocols written.  E.g. Doug Evans
> wrote the 'z' protocol.  It was intended for use over "mostly 8-bit"
> paths; it escaped the ^s/^q control characters, and a few others.
>
> --lyndon
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