[ih] The First Atlantic CyberWar - was uucp

[Clem Cole]

Jack.
There were two basic issues with a UUCP site.

1.) who can I get a news feed from?
2.) How do I keep my phone bills low?

In the beginning, when netnews was small, it was easy to get someone to
give you a connection.  But before Rick came along, it used to be a hundred
megabytes a night, and it could be quite a burden, so whoever was your feed
was really a good friend.  It began to get challenging to find someone who
would give you everything. Since it's just me, I did not care that I had a
filtered list, so I stripped my feed back a bit, but it was still
substantial.

As for the phones. The sending of a message defined the route x!y!z
 you needed
to know the topology. There were paths published fairly regularly that we
sourced from the big forwarding sites.  This is why Rick's UUNET project
was so important.  Once we got used to making local phone calls to Telenet
services to connect with Rick, it was a real game-changer.  I was trying to
find my old UUNET file before I wrote the earlier message because it
contains some of the fees.  I could not find it quickly. If I can find it,
I'll follow up.  But it was a small consulting firm, and Rick started up
right about the time I went independent.  I had UUCP connections to MIT and
a few places in Cambridge, but at the time, calls to 508 and 617 were toll
calls, so I was careful about even those.

 My netnews feed was from Masscomp, which was in Westford. While I could
call decvax and ucbvax, and a few of the 'big sites' directly, I was
conscientious about that.  Because I was 'ccc' I had to put some early spam
filtering in so people that were trying experiments did not accidental
route through me [I had a problem with getting multi-meg core dumps from
Amdahl's corporate computer center for a while that would force a call my
system tie up one modem from something like decvax tying up there line and
mine -- fortunately Tony Lyons' was an old friend and helped me get them to
fix the issue they had].

IIRC, once I subscribed to UUNET, I severed any link to a long-distance
site and was forced to use Telenet, which I don't remember. The way it
worked is that Rick never called you.   He had a ton of space, and you
polled him.  If you didn't get a netnews feed, polling him once or twice a
day via email was quick and reasonable.

Clem
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