[ih] The First Atlantic CyberWar - was uucp

[Craig Partridge]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2025 at 3:21 PM Clem Cole via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>
> 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.
>
>
Just a footnote here, this situation was not true for CSNET/UUNET.

Larger story: both CSNET and SEISMO/UUNET (Rick's unit) did most of their
email transfers after 5pm their local time (due to
the aforementioned calling tariffs, which dropped sharply after 5pm).  A
couple of hours after that, CSNET
and SEISMO would start to hammer the ARPANET (go back and look at the
ARPANET stats and my recollection is
you'll see their ports were typically in the top 3, with SRI-NIC being the
third) relaying emails between each other.

If either end had a hiccough, it usually meant a phone call at 1am (at
least at the CSNET end, from the BBN computer
center admins) indicating that disks were about to fill/overflow.
Sometimes things would not clear by morning and I
remember occasional chats with Rick about making sure our respective queues
were tidied up before the next
evening's rush.  (Part of the dynamic here was that CSNET made two calls to
each site every night -- the first delivery the
day's ARPANET email and pick up the site's email.  The second to deliver
all emails we'd received from other sites on
CSNET plus UUNET email.  And on busy days, we narrowly finished up those
calls before tariffs went up.  So there was
a certain amount of managing queues to try to ensure the next night would
go well).

Craig (former CSNET techie)


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