After awhile, Bill and Karen Shannon took this over (around 1984-5) and
made multi-page ASCII maps of Usenet. After about 1985 the net was too
big for this.
Recently Brian Reid has put out Postscript geographical maps of Usenet.
The earliest UUCP (email) maps were in people's heads - they would use
the Usenet map to route mail. Every so often someone would post a message
"I'm going to make a map, everybody send me your L.sys file" and 6 months
later they would emerge from under the avalanche of responses and give up.
If I recall correctly, both Lauren Weinstein and Steve Bellovin did this
at one time.
The current map started when Scott Bradner and Rob Kolstad undertook the
effort and stuck it out enough to finish the map. At that time they
handed it over to our UUCP Project which was organized with 10 or so
regional coordinators to maintain it and post it regularly.
The UUCP Project, which was founded by Karen Summers and I took over in
1986, ran from 1985 to 1988. It did the UUCP Map (Mel Pleasant
supervised the regional coordinators), produced and distributed smail 2
(Chris Seiwald and Larry Auton were the authors) and did domain registrations
for UUCP sites (myself and Tim Thompson).
In 1988, UUNET offered virtually free domain registrations, and we closed
down the domain and software parts of the UUCP Project. Mel took on the
mapping portion in conjunction with UUNET. He's still doing it today.
Mark
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16