>> (BT) Pathalias software (Honeyman)
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.
>> (BT) Formation of the "Backbone"
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu 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.
1) I had been maintaining the list of newsgroups for a while, and was
concerned at the time about the unrestrained growth in newsgroups
(little did I know....). I was also concerned about the very flat
namespace. At the time, I put together a mailing list to talk about
renaming newsgroups. Principles in that group were Chuq von Rospach
and Mark Horton. The discussion didn't go anywhere in particular at
the time, but I kept the list as a group to talk about matters of
importance. The people listed were admins or prominent sites....soon
to be the backbone.
2) I was aggressively trying to established better uucp connections to
gatech. I did some hand mapping with pathalias output and awk counts
on news articles, and came up with a small set of "regions" on the net
with important machines connecting those regions to others. I set up
connections from gatech to those machines and encouraged some other
cross-connections to improve propagation (anybody remember those mail
messages? A total stranger telling you to set up connections with
someone else... :-)
Eventually, by the time of the great renaming after the 1986 Usenix
conference, I formalized the backbone in a regular posting with a map
and a description of what consituted a backbone site --- good
connectivity, carrying the mainstream groups, and a commitment to
stable news and mail software. These were the same things I had
encouraged earlier on, or the reasons I had put people on the mailing
list.
This is also why I felt no major qualms about declaring the backbone
dead from NNTP-overdose years later....
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
>> > monthly postings of FYI stuff about 1984
>> [What's this one all about? -bj]
In 1981, Adam Buschbaum was posting an article now and then that
listed the newsgroups as he knew them. Adam was a HS student whose
father was at Bell Labs. When Adam went off to college (I think) in
1982, he asked me to take over the postings because he would no longer
have access. I have continued to do this as the list of active
groups.
Shortly thereafter, by a year or two, I started collecting a few other
things that appeared to be particularly useful for net readers to post
everything all together. I don't have the dates of when I added
items, but the first two to be added were the "Frequently asked
questions" by Jerry Schwarz and Chuq's "Netiquette" article. You
might try to find them and ask the dates.
>> (BT) net.women.only experiment
I remember this as 1984-1985
>> (BT) Hoaxes etc. (kremvax)
>> [Is there a copy of the kremvax article floating around somewhere?
>> I once saw a copy but ... -bj]
Ask Piet @ eunet.eu.net about this one. He was the author. 1987?
Chuq did the April Fools forgery of me warning about forgeries --
still one of my favorites.
>> (BT) The re-emergence of mailing lists
The mailing lists never went away, really. I used to post Rich
Zellich's list of mailing lists along with the newsgroup list until
they got too large. Then I tried extracting out the uucp only lists
and a few things that weren't in Zellich's list. It became a regular
posting, and hardly a month goes by where I don't get one or two new
ones added from people starting new ones or advertising old ones.
The flaps over net.women.only and net.motss created a small surge in
new mailing lists at that time.
(it net.motss in this list somewhere as a milestone?)
>> (BT) The emergence of voting for creating newsgroups
As I remember, this phased in from about 1987 on. As the influence of
the backbone began to wane, in part from workload, and in part from
flak, we would float calls for discussion of new groups, and a sort of
show of support. When the backbone "died" a more formal mechanism
took it's place about 6 months later. I seem to recall that the
anarchy in place as people started creating groups and flaming each
other brought that on. My memory here on all this is not clear -- it
fades together that this point as I began to curtail my news reading
and posting. I also went through about a 3 month period in the summer
of 1988 where I didn't post or read anything on the net....and almost
no one noticed.
>> (BT) Checkgroups messages (Spafford)
>>
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
>> > checkgroups -- late 1986
Checkgroups was added to B news by Rick Adams and myself in the months
following the 1986 summer Usenix. I seem to remember February of 87
as the actual first posting. This was in 2.11 B news
>> (BT) The problems with the old releases of B news
Continued at least into 1989 when I would get error messages when
creating new moderated groups.
>> (BT) Moderated newsgroups:
>> a) mod.announce
>> b) mod.newprod and commercial information on the net
>>
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
>> > moderated groups -- late 1986 (after summer Usenix in Atlanta)
mod.announce was the first -- an experiment. Mark Horton created it
after Rick Adams had modified the news to support it, backbone site
admins installed it, and I started sending out lists of moderator
addresses.
As I remember, Larry Auton (now lda@floyd.att.com) came up with the
idea originally at our "backbone" meeting at the Atlanta Usenix.
(Present were Horton, Pleasant, Adams, Auton, Heiby, Fair, Woods,
Beals, Spencer?, Jackson (Curtis), and me. There were at least one or
two more present, but I don't remember them. It was 3/4 of the
"backbone" of the time.)
>> (BT) The great renaming (Horton)
>>
>> >From rsalz@bbn.com Mon Sep 24 16:20 PDT 1990
>> > The renaming was instigated and done by Rick Adams because his
>> > news/sys file was getting unwieldy.
>>
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
>> > grand renaming -- started July 86, ended March 87
>>
>> >From stargate!mark@cis.ohio-state.edu Wed Sep 26 06:34 PDT 1990
>> > Actually, Rick Adams was the prime force behind this.
Actually, there were two discussions of renaming prior to the one in
86/87. I started one, and Chuq started the other. Rick was in the
mailing list for my discussion. The idea was one that finally
"ripened" by 1986. Rick was the one who did all the postings, but it
certainly wasn't all his idea. As I remember, the group of us
involved in the design floated a number of ideas, but Rick was the one
who condensed it and came up with the final proposal.
The idea for the top level hierarchies I believe came from Mel
Pleasant at the Usenix meeting. I remember we decided the names of
all the hierarchies at that time except for misc or rec, which Rick
added later.
>> (BT) The attempt to form comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac. (Webber)
This was in the summer of 87.
>> (BT) Monthly postings, newuser group, commonly asked questions.
>>
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
>> > monthly postings of newsgroups -- pre 1981
As noted above, the monthly postings were started by Adam Buschbaum in
1981 (at least) and continued by me. The newusers group was the
second moderated group created in summer 1986.
>> (BT) UUNET arrives (Adams) (Seismo fades)
Andybody ask Rick about this? If nothing else, someone at Usenix can
provide the date....
>> (BT) Internet & TCP/IP begins to pervade the net. The backbone begins to fade.
>> >From spaf@cs.purdue.edu Mon Sep 24 18:58 PDT 1990
>> > backbone goes away, 1987
I was wrong. I found a note to myself, June 15 1988, where I said
that I considered the backbone to be dead and I would no longer post a
"backbone" map. I removed the word "backbone" from all my regular
postings starting that month. I kept the mail aliases, though :-)
>> (BT) AT&T complains about source code on Killer, shuts it off temporarily(?)
Permanently.
>> (BT) The forming of comp.society.women (proposed as comp.women) (Roberts)
Hmm, I seem to believe this was near the end of 88, beginning of 89.
>> (BT) Oct/88 Internet Worm (perhipheral to usenet)
Nov 2, 1988, to be exact. :-)
>> (BT) Confiscation of USENET sites involved with phrack.
At this point, it is not clear that any Usenet site was confiscated
because of Phrack. Some Usenet nodes were confiscated, but the ones I
know about were confiscated because they were used for the storage and
transmission of trade-secret AT&T code, not because they had anything
to do with Phrack.
Neidorf's machine was confiscated to search for evidence for the
trial, but it was not a Usenet node.
>> (BT) EUNet and its policies (pay for feed, limit feed, not all groups)
This happened much earlier.
>> (BT) USENET over 10 megs/month
I'm not sure about this, but the figures I compiled on Oct 1, 1988 for
the IETF meething showed 11,000 sites; over 1800 articles per day;
over 4MB of traffic per day, average; and over 450 newsgroups.
My figures were taken from Rick Adam's summary stats posted from
Seismo or uunet, and from Brian Reid's arbitron stats.
That same presentation had these figures taken from stats by Adams,
Spencer, Horton, Bellovin and Reid:
1979 3 sites, ~ 2 articles per day
1980 15 sites, ~10 articles per day
1981 150 sites, ~20 articles per day
1982 400 sites, ~50
1983 600 sites, 120
1984 900 sites, 225
1985 1300 sites, ~375 articles per day, +1MB per day
1986 2500 sites, ~500, 2MB+
1987 5000 sites, 1000 per day, 2.5+MB
1988 11000 sites, 1800, 4+MB
Volume growth is exponential in number of sites, not in number of
newsgroups (as some have claimed). Plot the figures -- they make nice
curves.
I found some old stuff I'll pas along here in following messages...
--spaf
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16