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.
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16