VUNIC Surprise (Announcement 1)

I just wanted to express my appreciation and surprise at the (shall I call it) excitement and interest that has been generated by my suggestion that we use UUCP to connect vintage machines. Over the next couple weeks, I'm going to develop a working document and working group structure (not TOO structured!) to restart the UUCP Mapping Project (the whole thing, not just for vintage machines), put up the web site for VUNIC/VUnet and build a hub machine... possibly out the MVax 3100 or one of the Suns I'm getting this weekend running NetBSD. I'm just going to manage the Mapping Project, build a regional hub for the upper midwest and put resources and information on a web site. Several folks here have offered to help with these efforts and I'll be contacting you next week to see about getting stuff actually rolling. It's not my intention to try to influence the use of UUCP or to try to control who builds hubs, backbones, etc...I'll leave that to everyone else. I think the idea of creating an alternate Usenet and spam-free mail transports are absolutely wonderful ideas. I also want to encourage the use of UUCP for transferring files and making them easily available, in archive form, for others to retrieve. In Announcement 2, I'll mention more about this. Anthony Clifton COO/CTO - Captain Jack Communications Owner - Clifton Digital Resources Founder - The Internet User's Group of Iowa