Warning Toomey:
In ASCII at http://www.redace.org/html/logical_usenet_map_1984.html
===
That's no UUCP map. It's a USENET map: a map of netnews
propagation. No, they're not the same at all: many places
that used UUCP to exchange mail didn't participate in
netnews.
In particular I see a site I used to run with none of its
important mail links like ihnp4, and only a link to a
system I don't remember at all. I had left that site
a few weeks before that map was published, but I stayed
in touch with the folks there; had all the mail links
been torn down I'd have known. Had someone decided it
was worth while dipping a toe into netnews, though
(something I never bothered with) I might not.
In fact I suspect it would be difficult to find
believable maps for UUCP except amongst major forwarders.
At its peak it was an extremely informal network, with
lots of links that weren't published anywhere because
people at site A wanted to keep in touch with those at
sites B and C but didn't want to pay the bills to
forward mail between B and C, let alone between those
sites and places twelve time zones away.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
We are going to need some historical uucp maps so that we can construct
our simulated uucp network which bears some resemblance to the past.
There is a 1984 map on pages 7 to 14 of
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/AUUGN/AUUGN-V05.4.pdf
As Dave mentioned, we need some key sites like ihnp4, cbosgd etc.
What other key sites? Any volunteers to run some of them?
Warren
I was trying to look at mini-unix so I mounted the disk image inside
unix v6 via:
/etc/mount /dev/rk4 /usr/mini-unix
and I noticed that if I ran the mount command as a user and not root
that /etc/mtab would not be updated (but it was updated as expected as
root). Of course /etc/mtab is owned by root :)
Then I noticed something else when I did an ls in the /usr directory:
drwxrwxrwx 20 31 368 Sep 3 1976 mini-unix
Normally I would see things like:
drwxrwxr-x 2 bin 48 May 13 1975 adm
What does the 31 mean?
Mark
http://www.thefullwiki.org/UUCP
``UUCP was originally written at AT&T Bell Laboratories, by Mike Lesk, and
early versions of UUCP are sometimes referred to as System V UUCP.''
Err, it was V7, wasn't it? That considerably predates SysV...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."
Okay - let's make this an easy-to-dredge-through thread so I can easily
search for stuff later.
What means of interconnection are we going to use?
I should be able to provide:
1). Actual dial-in (probably not anything above 1200 baud...if I am
lucky)
2). SIMH "virtual leased line" dial-in
3). Network mail
A map/list of interconnections would be nice. Need a central database
somewhere.
--
Cory Smelosky
b4(a)gewt.net
> [a] case where AT&T attempted to see whether its Unix code had been stolen
> Coherent?
I doubt it. The only access to Coherent that I am aware of was Dennis's
site visit (recounted in Wikipedia, no less). Steve's Yacc adventure
probably concerned another company.
Besides the affairs of Coherent and Yacc, there was a guy in
Massachusetts who sold Unix-tool lookalikes; I don't remember his name.
We were suspicious and checked his binaries against our source--bingo!
At the same time, our patent lawyer happened to be negotiating
cross-licenses with DEC. DEC had engaged the very plagiarist as
an expert to support their claim that AT&T's pile of patents didn't
measure up to theirs. After a day of bargaining, our lawyer somehow
managed to bring casual conversation around to the topic of stolen
code and eventually offered the suspect a peek at a real example.
He readily agreed that the disassembled binary on the one hand must
have been compiled from the source code on the other. In a Perry
Mason moment, the lawyer pounced: "Would it surprise you if I told
you that this is ours and that is yours?"
The discredited expert didn't appear at next day's meeting.
The lawyer returned to Murray Hill aglow about his coup.
The product soon disappeared from the market.
Doug
On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Mar 2017, Dan Cross wrote:
>
> > One or more microcomputer BBS (Bulletin Board System) platforms had UUCP
> > support to bridge their store-and-forward messaging networks to USENET
> > and send email, etc. The implementation I remember off the top of my
> > head was Waffle, written by Tom Dell. [...]
>
> Was this the UUCP that was available for CP/M? I found it on the old
> Walnut Creek CD, moved it over to my CP/M box via SneakerNet (I ran CP/M
> for years, carefully avoiding DOS/WinDoze) and it worked; it was overlaid
> to hell and back hence really slow, but it worked.
>
Maybe? Though I tend to doubt it. It looks like Waffle originally ran on
the Apple II, but was fairly quickly ported to DOS and then Unix/Xenix. I
believe it was written in C, but the source code is not generally
available. More information on it is here:
http://software.bbsdocumentary.com/IBM/DOS/WAFFLE/
As I mentioned before, the BBS thing was kind of interesting. What strikes
me, however, is how closely the timing lines up with developments in the
Unix world. As Jacob mentions earlier, UUCP was "published" in February
1978 and an improved version distributed with 7th Edition in October of
that year. The first BBS was announced via an article in the November 1978
edition of Byte magazine (available online, with some information here:
https://www.wired.com/2010/02/0216cbbs-first-bbs-bulletin-board/)
For those that don't know, the whole idea behind a BBS was that a person
with a computer (usually a microcomputer), a modem, and a POTS phone line
(usually into the person's house) would run software on the machine that
answered the phone when called (assumed the remote caller was using a
modem, of course) and presented the remote user with an interface for
interacting with the local machine: most often, this was menu based. Most
often, the BBS only had one phone line and the functionality was limited:
sending and receiving simple messages, uploading and downloading files
using protocols like x- y- and zmodem (or kermit!) and maybe playing
specially written games. However, some BBSs became quite sophisticated
supporting multiple lines, interactive chat, multiplayer games and so
forth. Early software was mostly homebrew (the Byte article talks about
software *and* hardware), but eventually packaged systems emerged. There
was even a commercial marketplace for BBS software.
Around 1984, they developed a messaging "network" called Fidonet for
routing email and sending files around; the goal was to minimize
long-distance telephone charges by relaying things through nodes in the
network that were geographically "close" to the next calling region and
transmitting things in batch. Think USENET (which predated it by several
years) but much smaller in scope.
The Internet killed it for the most part, of course, but these things
developed quite the following; some are even still running, though most are
now accessible via telnet/ssh. Somewhat confusingly, some of the operators
seem to think they are some kind of alternative to the "Internet" instead
of just another application of the net. It's sort of an odd viewpoint, but
I think it comes from not being altogether all that savvy: it was mostly a
hobbyist thing. But in the BBS heyday, there was something like 100,000 of
them in North America alone.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I think the parity between the rise of BBSs
and UUCP/USENET is interesting.
- Dan C.
Warren wrote:
> > I might call for participation
> > in a uucp/Usenet reconstruction with people running simulated nodes on
> > the Internet.
On Wed, Mar 08, 2017 at 07:47:30AM +0100, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> Are modern systems welcome? I always wanted a bang path address!
I can't see why not, as long as you can simulate a serial connection
with a TCP connection, and can speak uucp.
Cheers, Warren
This scanned version includes all the cited manuals:
A Research UNIX Reader
Annotated Excepts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971-1986
M. Douglas McIlroy
https://archive.org/details/a_research_unix_reader
> From: jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu <mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (Noel Chiappa)
>
>> From: Paul Ruizendaal
>
>> The "Research Unix Reader"
>
> Thanks for mentioning that; I'd never heard of it. Very interesting.
>
>
> A query: it seems to have been written with access to a set of manuals for the
> various early versions of Research Unix. The Unix Tree:
>
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl <http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl>
>
> has the manual pages for V3 and V4, and V6 and later, but not the other
> ones. Do the manuals used for the preparatio of that note still exist; and, if
> so, is there any chance of getting them scanned?
