From [email protected] Fri Oct 12 18:41 PDT 1990
From: [email protected]
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 90 21:40:59 -0400
To: [email protected] (Bruce Jones)
Subject: The List again :-)
X-IMAPbase: 1230225498 13
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 1

My input to this sort of thing begins around 1983, which is when my
then-employer, Computer Consoles Inc of Rochester, NY, gained Usenet
access.  This is to say that I don't quite remember the initial
arrival of B News, but B was still pretty poor stuff :-).

  Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 17:49:45 pdt
  From: [email protected] (Bruce Jones)

  (BT) Chain letters over the net.

This actually happened very early on.  I got a chain letter in early
1983, even before I had Usenet access, but only UUCP mail access.

  (BT) net.women.only experiment

A sidelight on this: I distinctly remember some of the argument over
this (very late 1983, or very very early 1984, just before I left
CCI), and one event that sticks out in my mind very well was Laura
Creighton's contribution.  She was adamantly opposed to n.w.o's
creation, and went to some effort to describe why it was bad.  One of
n.w.o's supporters wrote her private mail which blasted Laura for her
position, ending with the supposition that, clearly, Laura was a
pseudonym, and "Laura" was evidently male, since no female would
oppose such a group.  Laura posted relevant parts of that mail in
net.flame under the Subject: "I found out what net.women.only is for!"

Laura seems to have kind of disappeared from the net -- last time I
saw anything at all from her must have been 1986, and she hadn't been
especially active for a year prior to that.  I have heard a rumor,
though, that she's still around, as well as mail-accessible at
hoptoad.  She's one of the net.personalities that ought to be
remembered.

  (BT) RN & Kill files (Wall)

Others have noted that RN's arrival was load-driven.  It might be
worth observing that a couple of other newsreading interfaces since
then have arrived on similar motivations, e.g., GNUS.  The format in
which GNUS can present articles, especially with the thread code of
v3.13, makes it possible to do amazing things with getting to the
exact news you want to read.  I understand that NN is good at this,
too, as well as trn.

  (BT) The problems with the old releases of B news
  (BT) Line Eater Bug

This was much earlier.  I can recall these problems while still at
CCI, before I joined Bell Labs.  I have a very dim memory of someone
(Mark Horton? either him or Rick Adams) posting a pseudo-emergency
message to net.news with a patch to fix the line-eater.  Early 1984, I
think.

  (BT) Moderated newsgroups:

You must include mod.ber in here.  mod.ber was a moderated group
created by/for Brian E Redman (of HDB [HoneyDanBer] UUCP) as a source
of weekly(?) summaries of Usenet traffic.  The idea was, I think, that
the Usenet was getting _SO_ big (heehee) that we needed volunteers
summarizing things for us so we could just sort of keep track of the
highlights and subscribe to groups along the way when we noticed
interesting topic threads in mod.ber.

  (BT) "biz" and "inet" hierarchies.  "Gnu" hierarcy.

Bob Sutterfield, then of OSU CIS, came up with gnu.* while in the
shower one morning.  He was sick of the volume he was getting in his
mailbox and decided he wanted it in a newsgroup where it belonged.
Early 1988, I think.  I wish my outgoing mail files went back that far,
I'd check for sure...but 18 months is about all I can stomach keeping.

  (BT) comp.sys.next violates voting rules

Ed Vielmetti issued the rmgroup a couple of days after issuing the
call for votes.  He was getting HUNDREDS of "yes" votes and wanted to
stem the flow.

Oh, yeah, a memory I'd almost lost.

The backbone disappeared (went under without a ripple) in summer of
1988.  I was particularly unhappy with this, believing that anarchy
would kill off things in a hurry.  So I tried to restart a backbone
mailing list, called news-gurus.  It had about 25 people in it.  Ed
was on it, and he was really concerned about his c.s.n vote, posted
his desire to newgroup c.s.n right away to news-gurus.  Argument
ensued that this was Bad, but Ed did it anyway.  He was proved right
in the end.  But it also spelled the beginning of the end of the new
mailing list.  25 was too large a group; flaming from people on it
with too much time on their hands and not enough experience managing
such stuff killed it.  I shut it down over a weekend after only a
month's existence.

There is a person (I'll not say who) who is re-creating yet another
backbone mailing list now.  It was started on the evidence of failing
anarchy of all the voting schemes and other trash.

  (BT) AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporarily(?)

It was shut down once temporarily, came back up, then disappeared
entirely a few months later.  I think the name change (killer ->
attctc) occurred when it came back up.

  (BT) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts)

Heh.  I had the misfortune to have issued the newgroup message for
c.s.w.

I may never forgive myself for that.

This was the beginning of the end of the original backbone.  The
backbone was flaming itself internally.  Lots of heat, no light at
all, lots of strident posturing.  Roberts finally offered c.s.w
(instead of comp.women or soc.women.something-or-other) as a
compromise, posted in news.groups.  I wrote mail to the rest of the
backbone and said that if no one screamed at me by 5pm that night, I'd
newgroup it.  No one did; I newgroup'd it around 7pm EDT.

I got hate mail in double digits for 6 weeks for that.  I had the bad
taste to do this on a Friday night before leaving for San Francisco
Usenix 2 days later, so I didn't even know I had all that mail until
I'd been gone a week.

  (BT) Alt.sex becomes #1 read USENET group

I don't know when this phenonemon occurred worldwide, but it's been
the case at my site since 2 weeks after it was created.

--karl

From [email protected] Mon Oct 15 11:13 PDT 1990
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: The List again :-)
Cc: [email protected]
Date: 15 Oct 90 13:56:31 EDT (Mon)
From: [email protected] (Mark Horton)
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 2

> My memory fails me on this, but someone had a "competing" program with
> pathalias that appeared just before (early 82?).  I believe it was
> called rpaths....   It simply took in news path information and mail
> paths, then saved out the shortest path between each two arbitrary
> sites.  It wasn't as sophisticated as pathalias because all edges were
> assumed to have unit length.
>
> I used it at Gatech for a year or so.  I remember that I shared path
> files with Rob Kolstad to feed the beast.  When it became evident
> there were a significant number of one-way links, most sites switched
> to pathalias.  We shouldn't forget that other program though (although
> I can't remember who wrote it -- John Quarterman?).  When Mark started
> the mapping project, I shipped him the files I had.

I don't recall this program, and I can't find a record of it.  I do recall
a program called uumail, I think from Spaf, similar to smail.

> >> (BT) Formation of the "Backbone"
> >> >From [email protected] Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
> >> > backbone creation, circa 1984
>
> I was the "father" of the backbone.  It came about from two different
> things.

The backbone went back further than this - to about 1982, I believe.
(I have maps at work which I'll check - this is from memory.)
I hand-crafted it with a fair amount of arm-twisting of various admins
to get a reasonable cross-country topology.

Interestingly enough, in those days we had much better connectivity to
Saskachewan than to Los Angeles, mainly due to a willing backbone host.
LA was a frustrating region - Rand was the only place with the capability
to be on the backbone, and they weren't willing.   SDC eventually took it
on (sdcrdcf) - they later turned into Unisys and became a leaf.

I think what Spaf did was formalize the previously informal backbone
into a mailing list with a written set of guidelines, which were
essentially the same as the informal ones I'd used to get responsive
admins at backbone sites.  He also made the mailing list and published
a map of the backbone, and he added a lot of sites to the backbone list
because they fit the stated criterea (rather than because they were
strategically located geographically and could swing phone bills, which
had been my real criterea.)

I guess this makes me the "grandfather" of the backbone, but in those
days (1981 until maybe 1984 or 5 or 6) I was the prime shaker and mover
behind Usenet.

       Mark

From [email protected] Mon Oct 15 12:12 PDT 1990
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re:  One last one
Date: 15 Oct 90 14:55:27 EDT (Mon)
From: [email protected] (Mark Horton)
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 3

       Anybody know whatever happened to Rich Rosen?  For a while, he
       accounted for something like 10% of all Usenet traffic.  Then he
       decided to stop posting to see if anybody missed him.  Nobody noticed
       for weeks....

The original prolific person was Lauren Weinstein.  He's been on "the net"
since "the net" meant the ARPANET and associated mailing lists.  I remember
once in the early 1980's he said "I read everything" (referring to all the
mailing lists and few newsgroups there were) and we believed him.

Once someone submitted an excellent parody called "Lauren Digest" which
was full of forged submisssions from Lauren on every subject known to
the net.  I don't have a copy of it anymore.

Another excellent early joke was by Brad Templeton somewhere around 1982:
"How many Usenet people does it take to change a light bulb."  This
definitely belongs in the archives.  Brad - do you still have a copy?

       Mark

From [email protected] Mon Oct 15 12:12 PDT 1990
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: Rich Rosen, etc.
Cc: [email protected]
Date: 15 Oct 90 15:00:11 EDT (Mon)
From: [email protected] (Mark Horton)
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 4

> >  Oh, Rich is still around in one form or another.  These days he seems
> > to
> >  prefer flooding mailing lists instead of Usenet groups, though.
>
> >  Another trivium: For a while, someone with the login "sjb" was doing
> >  the job of rmgrouping stuff (this was well before the "guidelines").
> >  Does anyone remember who he actually is, or any amusing anecdotes from
> >  the Group Creation Dark Ages?
>
> >  Also, any mention of net.general should surely mention Peter Honeyman'
> > s
> >  definitive overly-general posting of "Does anyone know what time it is
> > ?"
>
> >  --Amanda
>
> I don't know if it's the same sjb; for a while, Adam Buchsbaum (alb) was
> using his father's id, sjb.  (Sol Buchsbaum is a *very* high muckamuck
> at AT&T...).


It was theoretically Adam, as he normally used his father's login until
much later when he got his own (on Brian Redman's machine, I think.)

However, I think this sjb rmgroup stuff was a badly done forgery.
I am not sure - it's been a long time, and it might have been an
error on Adam's part.  It certainly was not Sol Buchsbaum, he's
a high level manager, not an avid technical computer person.

       Mark

From [email protected] Mon Oct 15 12:35 PDT 1990
Posted-Date: Mon, 15 Oct 1990 14:30:23 CDT
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 1990 14:30:23 CDT
From: Werner Uhrig <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] (Mark Horton)
Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Mailer: MM v0.88
Subject: paternaty, maternity, shmaternity (was Re: The List again :-)
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 5

> > I was the "father" of the backbone.
> I guess this makes me the "grandfather" of the backbone

       personally, I'd rather like to meet the mother;  that question
       should be alot easier to solve than "fatherhood" (at least if
       the analogy holds).  any paternity-suits yet?  hmm, some sites
       might want to sue for alimony, waving their phone-bills ... :-)

                                               :-)))

From [email protected] Mon Oct 15 12:47 PDT 1990
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected] (Werner Uhrig)
Cc: [email protected] (Mark Horton), [email protected], [email protected],
       [email protected]
Subject: Re: paternaty, maternity, shmaternity (was Re: The List again :-)
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 90 15:44:10 EDT
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 6

               personally, I'd rather like to meet the mother;  that question
               should be alot easier to solve than "fatherhood" (at least if
               the analogy holds).  any paternity-suits yet?  hmm, some sites
               might want to sue for alimony, waving their phone-bills ... :-)

As for the latter, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott and I have discussed the
concept of announcing that it was all a joke, we've had our fun,
and we can all take back our cycles, our disks, our phone lines, etc.

From [email protected] Mon Oct 15 19:49 PDT 1990
To: [email protected]
Subject: original backbones
Date: 15 Oct 90 22:26:53 EDT (Mon)
From: [email protected] (Mark Horton)
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 7

By the way, I've seen mention crediting Bill Shannon with the decvax link.
Bill was there and involved, but most of the credit goes to Armando Stettner
of DEC, who made it happen and got the phone bill footed.  At one point in
the early 80's he announced at Usenix that decvax's phone bill was running
a quarter million dollars/year, officially sanctioned by DEC as a goodwill
gesture to the net!

Even earlier than that, someone at research (Bell Labs Murray Hill) allowed
research to be set up as the center of the universe.  The first cross-country
link was from duke to research, then from research to ucbvax, all on
research's nickel.  I remember, while at Berkeley, exchanging email with
the original A news developers, and being amazed that I could get a reply
back a few hours later, even though research was polling both duke and ucbvax
to pick up waiting mail.

       Mark

From [email protected] Tue Oct 16 08:43 PDT 1990
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 11:40:35 EDT
From: [email protected] (James Ellis)
To: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re:  original backbones
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 8

Yes - I remember Armando's announcement of $250k/yr but can't recall
which conference it was.  By that time we were becoming numb to the expenses
people would go to just to pass news and e-mail around to other people.
Especially since Duke never had to pay any of those bills!
Still, this was a milestone.

Actually, although research was one of the original sites officially,
I didn't think they ran news until some time into the game.
At the Winter 80 (January) Usenix I gave a short talk announcing the
creation of Usenet and inviting anyone to join.  We even had printed up
little forms for folks to fill out giving their uucp info, etc.
(Sadly, I don't think any of these have survived.)  There were two
incentives for folks to be interested.

First was supposed to be the news software itself.  Since we expected
traffic on the order of a handful of items a week, one of the design goals
was that the news system be a useful tool for strictly local use.
(Which as already noted, led to the use of the "NET." prefix for non-local
news.)  We had to convince people to pick up the software for its own sake
and then hope they would find it easy and convenient to tie into network
news as well.  Or so we thought.  In retrospect it clearly was the net-wide
aspect of news that attracted everyone's attention.

Second we felt we needed to get across the idea that Usenet was already
a fully-functioning non-local network rather than the patchwork of
hopes and scripts that really existed.  By this time we did have a uucp
connection to research at Bell Labs thanks to Dennis Ritchie and Tom Truscott.
But I don't recall that they ran news.  (Steve B - just what state was the
news software in at all at that point, anyway?)  We put them on the map
that was displayed at the conference anyway as a Usenet "site".
(So the confusion between uucp-net and Usenet dates back to here!)
Dennis wouldn't let us name research though out of fears that BTL management
wouldn't like the idea so I had to refer to it as an unnamed research site
with a dot over on the East Coast.

This was the first Usenix I'd ever been to so I was rather nervous
but it seemed to go well.  Made everyone laugh and applaud when I described
Tom's homebrew autodialer!  It seems like it was only a few days after the
talk that our first site requested a connection - Reed college in Portland, OR
of all places.  They had no dialer either so we had to call them - they were
willing to be billed for the charges.   I don't recall if we ever billed them
or if we were ever paid, but Duke's department Chairman at the time seemed
very willing (to me) to foot some expenses to get Usenet off the ground.
Then there was a long drought and I don't recall who the next site added was.

I do recall that for a long while after Berkeley and Research were providing
cross-country connectivity, the connections were often very wasteful.
One of the worst examples was that Tektronix, in Oregon, couldn't send
e-mail to some other site (Reed?) a local phone call away because it was
against policy to set up the connection.  But they could, and did, send mail
via Berkeley/Research/Duke going cross-country twice to reach a local
phone call away!

From [email protected] Tue Oct 16 09:00 PDT 1990
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected] (James Ellis)
Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: original backbones
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 11:57:26 EDT
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 9

        By this time we did have a uucp connection to research at Bell
        Labs thanks to Dennis Ritchie and Tom Truscott.  But I don't
        recall that they ran news.  (Steve B - just what state was the
        news software in at all at that point, anyway?)

I think that my pre-A C-language version was running then.  The
efficiency of the shell script was too low, and I'm fairly certain that
A-news wasn't quite ready yet.  (In the grand tradition of computer
companies everywhere, we announced before we had a product...)

A year or two later, CSnet was announced.  I remember that we commented
how this showed the true difference between grad students and faculty.
When we wanted to connect universities and research sites, we wrote
some software quickly, handed out a few simple forms, and scrounged
everything, from dialers to connectivity.  When some professors wanted
to do the same thing, they got a grant from NSF, set up formal support
and monitoring stations, secured DARPA permission to connect to the
ARPANET, published a bunch of papers, etc.


               --Steve Bellovin

From [email protected] Tue Oct 16 09:11 PDT 1990
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 12:02:32 EDT
From: [email protected] (Amanda Walker)
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re:  original backbones
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 10

>I do recall that for a long while after Berkeley and Research were providing
>cross-country connectivity, the connections were often very wasteful.

Indeed.  I suspect that there are any number of examples of this, but the
most egregious in my experience was at CWRU.  The ECMP department had a VAX
11/780 on Usenet ("cwruecmp"), and the campus computer center had a DEC-20
in the room next door.  The machines were separated by a grand total of about
30 feet and a piece of wallboard, but the computer center was not at all
interested in "catering" to "those CS types" by stringing an RS-232 line
between them.  So, it was possible to send mail between them, but only
by sending via a route resembling:

       crwuecmp => decvax => ucbvax (UUCP)
       ucbvax => columbia (CU20A, I think) (ARPANET)
       columbia => cmu-cs-c => cwru20 (CCnet)

Yup, that's three networks, and two coasts just to get through a piece of
sheetrock :-).  Took about a week, too.

The funny thing is, I have to do something similar to get mail across the
DC beltway to my brother at Goddard Spaceflight Center even today...

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

--Amanda

From [email protected] Tue Oct 16 15:01 PDT 1990
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 17:57:26 -0400
From: Thomas Truscott <[email protected]>
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re:  original backbones
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 11

My recollection of the first sites were:
       duke - unc
then
       phs (Duke Physiology dept. via 9600 baud wire) - duke - unc
duke was a CS department PDP 11/70.
unc was a CS department VAX I think.
phs was a PDP 11/60.

There were uucp (non-usenet) connections for one or two other duke machines,
and "research" at Bell Labs.  Perhaps "duke34" (a machine
sitting next to "duke") was on Usenet too, but it barely counts.

I think vax135 at Bell Labs (where UNIX 32V was developed)
was the next Usenet member.  (Might have been Reed, I dunno).
vax135 caused an upheaval in A news,
because they would not let uucp copy files to their system.

As I recall, the very first implementation of news broadcast did
something like:
       uucp  -l  <newsarticle>  remote!/usr/spool/uucppublic/inbound
We considered using uux but that would have been less efficient
than a simple copy, and would have used up precious disk space.
But vax135 would not permit the above uucp request,
so we gave up and switched (overnight) to
       uux  -r  remote!rnews  <newsarticle>
Since there were so few sites compatibility was not a big issue!
We figured the performance hit and space wastage was tolerable
since there would be only a few articles per day.
To avoid stupid "exit 0" messages from uux we had to make
a source code change to uuxqt, but then one needed to
make source code changes to mail and uucp just to set the host name!
(We distributed a "setup.n" document, describing how to set up uucp.)
       Tom Truscott

From [email protected] Tue Oct 16 15:22 PDT 1990
From: [email protected]
To: Thomas Truscott <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: original backbones
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 18:11:44 EDT
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 12

        My recollection of the first sites were:
               duke - unc
        then
               phs (Duke Physiology dept. via 9600 baud wire) - duke - unc
        duke was a CS department PDP 11/70.
        unc was a CS department VAX I think.

No, an 11/45 at the time.

        phs was a PDP 11/60.

        There were uucp (non-usenet) connections for one or two other duke machines,
        and "research" at Bell Labs.  Perhaps "duke34" (a machine
        sitting next to "duke") was on Usenet too, but it barely counts.

Greg Woodbury says it was....  (And he's still active on the net.)

        I think vax135 at Bell Labs (where UNIX 32V was developed)
        was the next Usenet member.  (Might have been Reed, I dunno).
        vax135 caused an upheaval in A news,
        because they would not let uucp copy files to their system.

        As I recall, the very first implementation of news broadcast did
        something like:
               uucp  -l  <newsarticle>  remote!/usr/spool/uucppublic/inbound
        We considered using uux but that would have been less efficient
        than a simple copy, and would have used up precious disk space.
        But vax135 would not permit the above uucp request,
        so we gave up and switched (overnight) to
               uux  -r  remote!rnews  <newsarticle>
        Since there were so few sites compatibility was not a big issue!
        We figured the performance hit and space wastage was tolerable
        since there would be only a few articles per day.
        To avoid stupid "exit 0" messages from uux we had to make
        a source code change to uuxqt, but then one needed to
        make source code changes to mail and uucp just to set the host name!
        (We distributed a "setup.n" document, describing how to set up uucp.)
               Tom Truscott

We also had to change uucp to add to the list of legal commands, it being
hard-wired in at the time.  Since some sites wouldn't even make that change,
we added a mail encapsulation very early in the game.  The idea was to mail
to some magic user name; periodically, a shell script would extract it.
The shell script would use mail itself to extract the mailbox, thus avoiding
the need to do compatible locking.

From [email protected] Tue Oct 16 16:58 PDT 1990
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 16:52:27 pdt
From: [email protected] (Bruce Jones)
To: [email protected]
Subject: Mail Archive Available
Status: RO
X-Status:
X-Keywords:
X-UID: 13


I am setting up an anon ftp archive for the mailist old mail.  IT is
available on weber.ucsd.edu or as 128.54.16.129, login anonymous and
your login as passwd.  The files are in the directory usenet.hist
and are sorted by date -- i.e., nethist.101090.  If the disk space
gets short (as all disk space is wont to do) I will have to store
the files in compressed state.  Would that pose a problem for
anyone? Or is there a better storage scheme?

Enjoy, I am :-)

bj

-

You are viewing proxied material from sdf.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.