On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:21:09PM -0700, Eric Smith wrote: 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). 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 South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -90.9 F (-68.3 C) Windchill -123.8 F (-86.5 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 6.5 kts Grid 36 Barometer 674.7 mb (10829 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

Allison wrote: I think there was some brief mention of UUCP in the thread. I remember UUCP from circa 1981/2 just before we got a connection to the ARPANET/Internet. It was not a 'transparent' user experience. I put it in that class of "pre-networking networks": we can copy a file from machine to machine, let's hack together some user apps to make use of it and hack together a rudimentary routing technique.

I wrote: Sridhar Ayengar wrote: I thought the discussion was about the first internet email?