What is "The Internet" TCP/IP or UNIX-to-UNIX ?

Sun Apr 4 20:39:17 UTC 2010

> But when I think of "network" I think of things like the PSTN, ABC,
> Mutual, California's DOJ torn-tape TTY, and FIDO where the message to be
> delivered was the focus and the internal works were pretty much
> uninteresting to the "user".

Read "Notable Computer Networks, John Quarterman and Josiah Hoskins,
CACM Vol 29, No 10, Oct 1986", UUCP was considered one of the
"Cooperative Networks".

>> UUCP was not just a point to point protocol. Originally it was a set
>> of utility programs to permit copying files between Unix systems (Unix
>> to Unix CoPy, hence the name), since electronic emails where
>> essentially files UUCP became the transport mechanism for both
>> electronic email and later Usenet News.
>
> CoPy is the only decode that ever occurs to me.  And the file view of
> the world is correct and I had forgotten it.

Steven Bellovin can give you more details, there are several papers
and he wrote one with Peter Honeyman who is the guy that rewrote the
original version of the UUCP utilities developed by Mike Lesk at AT&T.

> Mine is that while "UUCP" took on a networkish patina in recent years (I
> know a place here in town that still uses it, or did when I last had
> contact with them a few years ago).

I know some that still use it.

> With UUCP you had to dial somebody up, say howdy (sometimes human to
> human) and issue the copy command.  Sure enough, frequent users had cron
> jobs and scripts to do all that.  And sure enough, co-operative sites
> would strip their own names off the beginning of a bang path and pass
> the file to the next in line, the next time they talked to them.  Which
> might be anywhere from a few seconds to never from now.

Read RFC976 for additional details.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc976

Cheers Jorge.