From: ronda@ais.org (Ronda Hauben)
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: 26 Jan 1993 03:13:44 GMT
Organization: UMCC
Distribution: world
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ronda@ais.org responding: 

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?   The comparison of
: Usenet/NetNews as a poor man's ARPAnet came well after the initial
: growth spurt of the Usenet network began.   The comparison did not
: become obvious until after the Usenet started spreading to more than 30
: or 40 sites.
: 

I didn't invent the early reference to Usenet as "a Poor Man's Arpanet".
It was contained in the invitation to join usenet that was distributed
at the Delaware Usenix Meeting where Usenet software was put on the 
conference tape.

       I was surprised to find the reference that early - but it was
there in the early documents.

       I'd like to understand better the significance of it because
it does seem to put usenet in the context of building on and in fact
improving on the pioneering research that proceeded it.


 	The original concept was more one of a "groupware" arrangement
: to allow folks with similar concerns to converse despite physical and
: temporal differences.
: 

   But weren't those who had been excluded from the ARPANET both
aware of that exclusion and also interested in having access to
a similar valuable network?

: 	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.

: 	The specification for the B-News version took form from the
: combination of ARPAnet mailing lists and the hierarchical namespace that
: A-News provided.  The decision to use E-Mail format headers was intended
: to allow easy gatewaying of items from NetNews into Mailing Lists and
: vice versa, and to encourage the development of an easy and simple
: NetNews Transfer Protocol (now called NNTP) based on the SMTP protocol
: model.   Needless to say, this sort of development did NOT happen
: directly.  The Internet didn't pay as much attention to NetNews as some
: thought they might, and NNTP was developed well after the introduction
: of NetNews to the Internet/ARPAnet community.
: 
And it seems sometimes that the Internet still doesn't pay as much
attention to NetNews as they might :)

Usenet seems rarely mentioned in public accounts of the Internet
for example the article "Building the Electronic Superhighway"
in the Sunday, Jan. 24, 1993, issue of the New York Times in the
Business section, leaves out NetNews and the interactive nature of
Usenet is ignored -- what is proposed is basically a computer
version of current U.S. t.v. (i.e. all top down). 

: 	The superior performance of NetNews over large Mailing lists was
: not really noticed early on, and to this day there are folks who are not
: fully convinced of the superiority of NetNews over Mailing lists.  There
: are, in fact, some situations where Mailing Lists are superior to
: NetNews, but they are limited to specific situations and (generally)
: small numbers of folks involved.
: 

I agree that newsgroups are a significant improvement over mailing lists.
One has to have access to large mailbox space to be able to deal with 
a mailing list.

     
Do you have any idea why newsgroups first occurred as part of 
Usenet and NOT as part of Arpanet?

: 	Once the nature of course that Usenet was developing became
: clear, the analogy to ARPAnet was obvious.  However, it is definitely
: not correct to imply that Usenet was intended as any sort of competition
: to ARPAnet from its inception.
: 
I wasn't suggesting that Usenet was intended as "competition" which
would have been impossible because Arpanet wasn't open to lots
of folks because they didn't have the DOD contracts that made
it possible for one to have the money to pay for being part of 
the ARPANET -(i.e. the funding for ARPANET was supposedly a part of ones 
DOD grant).

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?


                   Ronda

              
                           
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