[ih] Maps or lists of early UUCP nodes/networks in the Boston area?

[Greg Skinner]

On May 11, 2026, at 5:51 AM, Dan York via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi!  Something random and low priority… does anyone know of maps or lists of early UUCP nodes, particularly in the Boston area?
> 
> Recently I was explaining to someone about bang-path addressing for messages and I was trying to remember the UUCP address I was giving people back in the day.
> I remember it was “mit<something>!mv!srbci!ldy”. I think maybe it was “mitvax”?   (I was part of a small consulting company in southern New Hampshire in the early 1990s that was connected to “MV Communications” that was in turn connected, I think, to a node at MIT.)
> 
> I spent a while searching the web and even plunging into the comp.mail.maps archive in Google Groups… and couldn’t find anything readily available today. I mostly found various messages pointing to sites that are no longer around (or found sites with links to sites that are gone).
> 
> Anyway… just curious if anyone knows of such a map or list purely so I can fill in a mental hole in my memory. 🙂  (Of which there seem to be more as time goes on..)
> 
> Thanks,
> Dan
> 
> --
> Dan York, Senior Director, Online Trust & Safety  |  Internet Society
> york at isoc.org | +1-603-439-0024 | https://mastodon.social/@danyork
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I was able to find several entries for ’srbci’ with the Google Groups query https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.maps/search?q=srbci.

From the looks of several of these entries, such as the following, ‘mv’ was a UUCP neighbor of ’srbci’.

#N .mv.com, mv
#O MV Communications
#C Mark E. Mallett
#E m... at mv.MV.COM
#T 603 429 2223
#P P.O. Box 4963, Manchester NH; 03108-4963
#L 42 56 N / 71 26 W City
#R
#R mv.MV.COM is an Internet hub providing mail, news, and other
#R services for the southern NH / northern MA area on a (low!)
#R fee basis. It is also the gateway for the .MV.COM "domain park",
#R a registered domain covering small sites and independant businesses
#R in this area.
#R
#R Inquiries welcome: mail to in... at mv.mv.com or call 603 429 2223.
#R
#U critz decvax eci pulsar rr siia summa4 verbal1 zinn
#W m... at mv.MV.COM (Mark E. Mallett); Sun Oct 27 16:07:18 EDT 1991
#
# Domain gateways:
#
mv .mv.com(LOCAL)
#
# Full domain alias:
mv= mv.mv.com
#
# Outgoing calls:
mv decvax(DIRECT+HIGH), ditka(EVENING+FAST), harvard(EVENING+FAST),
jjmhome(EVENING)
#
# Incoming calls:
mv balrog(DAILY),
contek(POLLED), <critz>(DIRECT+FAST), ctedge(DIRECT),
<eci>(DIRECT), <goldfnch>(WEEKLY), <helmers>(DIRECT),
<jlc>(DIRECT), lemuria(DIRECT+FAST), <loiosh>(DIRECT),
midnight(DAILY+FAST), <molly-bloom>(DIRECT),
<objects>(DAILY), <pondsquid>(DIRECT),
<pulsar>(DIRECT), <pophyn>(DIRECT), <rr>(WEEKLY/2),
<siia>(DIRECT), <srbci>(DIRECT),
<summa4>(DIRECT), <three>(WEEKLY+FAST),
<trashbin>(DIRECT), <vauto>(DIRECT), <verbal1>(DIRECT),
<virgin>(EVENING+FAST), <wgc386>(DIRECT), <wtfm>(DIRECT),
<zinn>(DIRECT)
#
# Misc reverse definitions:
harvard mv(EVENING)
decvax mv(DIRECT+HIGH)

'mit-vax' could have been an undocumented UUCP neighbor of ‘mv’.  It appears on USENET maps from the 1980s available by issuing a similar Google Groups query in net.news.map.  Mark Plotnick <https://stackoverflow.com/users/2554472/mark-plotnick> is listed as the site admin on several entries.  I recall he did some Chaosnet work while he was at MIT.

--gregbo