From: news@wolves.Durham.NC.US (The Wolfe of the Den)
Newsgroups: alt.amateur-comp,alt.folklore.computers,alt.culture.usenet
Subject: Re: Input Need for Talk on "Usenet News:The Poor Man's Arpanet"
Date: 27 Jan 93 16:28:44 GMT
Organization: Wolves Den UNIX

In <1k2a98INNhgf@srvr1.engin.umich.edu> ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben) writes:
>The Wolfe of the Den (news@wolves.Durham.NC.US) wrote:
>: In article <ronda.727667230@ais.org> ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben) writes:
>: >
>: >What I wanted to do is to give some background of the ARPANET
>: >and then show how Usenet was developed as a Poor Man's ARPANET.
>: 
>: 	Putting the cart before the horse?   [etc....]


>: 	The UUCP mail network (just as ad hoc as Usenet, and NOT
>: synonymous with Usenet) did have early conparisons with ARPAnet since
>: e-mail was one of the main early services of the ARPAnet.
>: 
>But wasn't the UUCP mail network developed along with the news, and
>also, the sense I have gotten from reading some of the descriptions
>of the development of the mail network is that there were sites that
>no pathway was known to get to, but that since usenet got to lots
>of places, one could follow the path that usenet had used to send email.

	Yes and no.  UUCP is/was totally seperate from the Usenet paths.
There are hundreds of uucp "mail only" links that don't have NetNews
traversing the link.

	The problem in UUCP-land of needing unique names, and a high
level registry for the .UUCP pseudo domain was certainly made much
easier (and driven by) the access to NetNews for coordination.

	It has been pointed out many times that the existence of a path
in NetNews distribution does NOT necessarily mean that the same link can
be used for third-party mail traffic!   This distinction was one of the
motivators for the development of the UUCP registry.

>Rather the invitation to join Usenet handed out at the Delaware Usenix
>Conference in Spring/Summer 1980 used the phrase "Poor Man's Arpanet"
>and there was obviously a good reason this phrase was used in some of 
>the earliest literature describing and inviting people to join Usenet.
>
>: 	The folks who developed NetNews certainly had a great deal of
>: vision and inspiration, but I don't think that any of the real early
>: folks involved had quite so grand a vision as that.  The early evolution 
>: had a totally different "feel" to it.
>
>Can you explain then why they used the phrase in the 1980 invitation 
>to join Usenet?

Hummmmmmmmm.  A memory lapse?  I too, am rather suprized that it
appeared that early in the promotion of Usenet.  My impression was that
it was much later in the year that that appeared.

	[I could also beg that there were other distractions in 1980,
since I got married on Jan 11th of that year and was a bit busy at other
persuits for part of the time. :-)   I've said a few times before that
my time sense is a bit skewed in that period, and I'll defer to Tom
Truscott and the other more active participants for exact chronologies.]

			Greg Woodbury, aka the Red Wolfe
-- 
Usenet Net News Administrator @ The Wolves Den  (G. Wolfe Woodbury)
news@wolves.durham.nc.us  news%wolves@cs.duke.edu  ...duke!wolves!news
"The flame war is a specific Usenet art form." --me
[This site is not affiliated with Duke University. (Idiots!) ]
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