[ih] Overlay networks

[Steve Crocker]

>
> Jack,


Apropos of your tidbit re looping email lists, here's an earlier incident.

>
> At some point in the 1970s, I remember accidentally creating a "loop" in
> the email network.  It was amazingly simple to do.  All that was
> required was to add an address to some mailing-list, where the new
> address was actually the address of another mailing list on some other
> machine.   With the emerging fascination with mailing lists at the time,
> it was easy to imagine how a complex loop of emails might be created.
>

When we created the RFCs, the rule was for the clerk at the author's site
to send one copy of the newly created RFC to each person on the mailing
list.  The mailing list consisted of one person at each site.  Copies for
each of the people at the site were the responsibility of the clerk at that
site.

The MERIT folks were developing their original three node network --
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan State University in Lansing,
and Wayne State University in Detroit.  They set up their own mailing list
for the notes they generated.  In the spirit of collegiality, we each put
the other on our mailing lists.  The clerks assigned to the local
distribution tasks dutifully did their jobs, and we soon found ourselves
receiving copies of our own RFCs coming back from MERIT ;)

Steve