[ih] The First Atlantic CyberWar - was uucp

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)]

> 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.

Traffic volumes didn't get that high until the 90s, and by then
NNTP was taking over.  I remember when Usenet hit 5 MB/day, some
time around 1987.  In 1988, when I left Nexus (ncc) for Athabasca
Univrsity, ncc was providing full feeds to at least a dozen sites
with no modem bandwidth issues.  In fact, my biggest traffic
concern wasn't Usenet, it was the ftpmail service at decwrl!  Our
local UUCP neighbours used to regularly gum up the UUCP queues
as they tried to download the entire internet via UUCP mail :-)

--lyndon