From: bx953@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (David R. Cohen)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Thanks, I'm not a Moron anymore
Date: 24 Jul 92 14:31:27 GMT
Reply-To: bx953@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (David R. Cohen)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)


Thanks for all your responses ... don't send anymore, I'm going out of town
and I got all I can handle.  Many people wrote to say "post what you get."
Here is one answer that I found very useful, if I get the time, I'll post
more.  thanks again.

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From: rsm@math.arizona.edu (Robert S. Maier)
Subject: information!
To: bx953@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (David R. Cohen)


How does Usenet work (and how did it get that way)?  

Well, from its earliest days (c. 1980, when it was started up in North
Carolina) it has been an agglomeration of computer systems, sending news
articles to each other, by means which usually include modems and phone
lines.  (These days it's a bit more sophisticated.)

The following is how it was set up.  In the late '70s Unix was developed at
Bell Labs (now AT&T Bell Labs), in New Jersey.  Their version of Unix
included a command `uucp', which would let users copy files to other Unix
systems (with proper authentication, or course) via modem.  Sort of an
automated version of kermit, get it?  uucp stood for Unix-to-Unix copy.

Almost immediately, Unix machines at Bell Labs and elsewhere (mostly
universities) were being hooked together by autodialers, so that users
could transfer files from machine to machine, sometimes across the country.
A little later (still before 1980) e-mail began to be sent by the same
means.  (The messages were typically batched together, and copied across
every hour or so.)  In no time at all, there was a working national e-mail
network called loosely, `the UUCP net'.  It still exists.

In 1980 some people in North Carolina had the bright idea of using this 
automatic file-copying network to distribute news articles and bulletins
as well as individuals' e-mail.  Hey presto!  Usenet came to be.  It
spread like wildfire; the infrastructure (the UUCP net) was already there.
At the time, `Usenet' simply meant "that portion of the UUCP net which 
sends and receives news articles".  I.e. that portion of it which, in 
effect, made up a single nationwide (soon to be worldwide) bulletin board.

In the early '80s something else happened.  The old Arpanet (a high speed
[far faster than phone lines!] network originally set up by DARPA to
connect Universities with defense contractors), the network on which such
software as `ftp' was developed, also began to spread like wildfire.  This
was largely because university ethernets began to be connected to it.  This
greatly facilitated e-mail communication.  E-mail messages could be routed
via the Arpanet (later renamed the Internet) as well as the UUCP net.  Even
people not connected to the Internet could use the Internet, in this sense.

Around 1986-87 various folks got the idea of using the Internet, instead of
the old UUCP net, as the backbone of Usenet.  In other words, the
cross-country links, and the international links, which carry much of the
news flow, were switched over from old-fashioned modem hookups to sleek,
modern Internet cables.  (A scheme called NNTP, the Network News Transfer
Protocol, was invented for this purpose.)  But many Usenet end-users, like
yourself, remained unconnected to the Internet.

That's basically the way it is today, though the Internet has grown much
further: even community colleges and high schools are connecting to it.
But there are still a lot of sites (e.g. Cleveland Freenet, your own) which
are only connected to Usenet through UUCP, and which have no *direct* link
to the Internet.  That's why you can't use ftp, or transfer files in real
time.  Your posted news articles certainly reached the Internet though;
they flowed through it to reach me here in Arizona!  Being at a University
I'm on the Internet.  

(We used to have a UUCP hookup here in our department, but I haven't used
it in ages.  I doubt it still works; the modem has been junked.  But for 
a while, until c. 1987, it was our only connection to the outside world.
I sent an awful lot of messages through that modem!  But nowadays
we've got a fibre optic cable in our basement which is our Ethernet
feed, and which serves as our connection to the Internet.)

I could give you more details, but that's enough for now.  Let me know if
you have any more questions.

--Robert

--

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Internet:  rsm@math.arizona.edu            Robert S. Maier               
|
|            rsm@cs.arizona.edu              Assistant Professor           
|
| Bitnet:    maier@arizvms                   Department of Mathematics     
|
| UUCP:      uunet!arizona!amethyst!rsm      University of Arizona         
|
| PHONE:     +1 602 621 6893                 Tucson, AZ  85721             
|
|            +1 602 621 2617                 U.S.A.                        
|
| FAX:       +1 602 621 8322                                               
|
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