Posted by Low Life #3 on 02/04/07 18:11

"Bill Vermillion" <bv@wjv.com> wrote in message news:JCxvqF.1sy1@wjv.com...
:
: And what was the backbone site? Seismo? So much of the stuff on
: my machine came in via a uucp bang path, and here in the East
: almost everything seemed to go through Seismo.

My backbone site was MCNC between Duke and UNC and we had Alvin, Simon and
Theodore as our in basement servers, all DEC mainframes. Consumption of
vast amounts of alcohol since those halcyon days has removed everything but
a few memories of commands I once gave to make these three dinosaurs do
their stuff, but I still have vivid memories (and years later continuing
nightmares) of sitting at a command/control station teletext like device and
typing in line by line backup and restore instructions. Make one tying
mistake, and you had to start from the top (after making an escape and
setting the bitch back to receiving command mode).

UUCP is a point-to-point connection protocol, and instead of the network
looking to the user like an amorphous blob, it had the form of a graph
(in the graph-theory sense). "Network maps" were produced from time to
time which looked like this. (The machine names are real, but the
connections are drawn at random.)

utzoo ----- decvax ------ seismo ----- ihnp4
| | |
ittvax harpo mcvax
|\---utcsri |
| ---lsuc duke ----- unc
dciem |
phs

Now the thing is that on such a diagram you can choose to emphasize a
set of lines forming a path through the hosts -- say "utzoo - decvax
- seismo - ihnp4". The "backbone" was simply a group of hosts whose
admins agreed to form such a connected set, and to devote whatever
resources were necessary to carry all the Usenet traffic and to pass
it on promptly (rather than, say, waiting for overnight when their
machine was less busy, as other sites often did).

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/marthag/News/backbone_cabal


: And I STILL post using a vi text editor :-) And 80x24 text with
: trn. [and I run my own new server on THIS machine - and I'm the
: only user - but it means everything is always there - instantly.
: I'm just an old fart who dislikes having to take my hands off the
: keys to play with a rodent. I guess I'm an anachronism.

gawd! still using the vi editor. all I can remember are the escape
sequences all of which end in *bang* (they outta make you a living
treasure).

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