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

Lamar Owen lowen at pari.edu
Mon Apr 5 15:49:52 UTC 2010


On Saturday 03 April 2010 09:38:46 pm IPv3.com wrote:
> What is "The Internet" TCP/IP or UNIX-to-UNIX ?

'The Internet' is a collective internetworking of several thousand autonomous 
systems, using a common protocol, that masquerades as a unified whole. Whether 
this protocol is 1822, NCP, or IPvX is irrelevant.

--

On the UUCP memory lane side of this thread, I had a site in the uucp maps way 
back when, used smail on a Tandy 6000, then an AT&T 3B1, took a stripped-down 
feed (a full feed at 9600 over InterLATA long distance was brutal, even when a 
full feed was only 40MB per day), and had both a '.uucp' pseudo-FQDN as well 
as a bang path from uunet as such.  Ran C-News on both the T6K and the 
3B1....whew, that's a long time ago.

My uucp upstream had leased line uucp links to more than one upstream.  His 
upstream links were active pretty much all of the time, and I do for one 
remember doing multihop bang path uucp using HoneyDanBer on the 3B1 many 
moons ago.  Sort of a poor-man's FTP archive access.  He for a while took full 
feeds on Sun 3 gear, which was an upgrade from the Tandy 6000 that previously 
had had 9600bps leased line links, and was how I found him in the first place, 
being a T6K user.  

Many software archives were available with bang-path uucp; with pathalias and 
the uucp-maps loaded you could even do, IIRC, uunet-homed bang-path uucp.  And 
when all but your own path were on leased lines, the transfer happened pretty 
much immediately, at least for small stuff.  Then he got leased line SLIP 
links, and got his own real FQDN.  He's still out there, and still offers UNIX 
shell access....nanook, you listening?

There was business in uucp linkage back in the day;  uunet made its start that 
way, remember?

As to the sendmail 'hack;'  well, uucp was and is just another email 
transport, like SMTP or Netmail/Echomail, is.  Nothing really hackish about 
it.

So, since, through uucp 'proxies' to ftp archives (a uucp to IP gateway of 
sorts), was I 'on the Internet' or not?  Yes and no.....but then I got SLIP 
access, thanks to Karn's KA9Q NOS ported to 3B1, and the rest, as they say, 
was history.  

Still have my first editions of 'Managing UUCP and Usenet' and 'Using UUCP and 
USenet' packed away somewhere....




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