On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:21:09PM -0700, Eric Smith wrote:
Allison wrote:
I'm a bit surpirzed no one has mentioned UUCP.
While uucp can be run over the internet, it is fundamentally a
store-and-forward system, and unrelated to internet protocols.
That is a concise way of putting it - in one sense, an assemblage
of UUCP hosts is a network of sorts, but by a technique that optimises
passing discrete gobs of prewritten content (files/e-mails/articles)
over any sort of real-time interaction. Part of, but not all of
what "The Internet" is and does.
I myself had nearly 10 years of experience with UUCP before I ever
sent or received a single packet using TCP/IP. I also used UUCP
more than 10 years after that point, too (it was still in widespread
use within Lucent through the late 1990s as an in-house software
distibution channel - my co-workers were surprised that someone
a) as young as me, and b) who hadn't already been working at Bell
Labs for years, came in the door in the mid-1990s knowing how to
set up UUCP).
Certainly for a number of years, it was the primary way in which
most people got e-mail from outside their employer/institution,
but e-mail is not the whole of "The Internet" (and neither is
the Web).
IIRC uucp was invented by Mike Lesk around 1976.
I knew it was old when I first loaded it up, but wasn't sure how old.
Thanks for the datapoint.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Jul-2008 at 06:40 Z
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Ethan.Dicks at
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