Re: Maps and mapping
Mark Horton (mark@stargate.COM)
28 Nov 90 10:22:35 EST (Wed)
The first maps (10-30 hosts) were for curiousity and to help publicize
the net. Shortly thereafter, they had an important role for mail routing;
we didn't have pathalias and people would read them to figure out how to
manually route their mail. (The maps were of Usenet, not UUCP, but they
got used for mail a lot anyway because there wasn't anything else.) After
awhile they became very popular at Usenix and people would snap them up,
so there was some sense of satisfying the public.
It wasn't until about 1985 when the real UUCP map data started to become
available in any form useful for pathalias and automatic mail routing.
At that point, there was no longer a need for the pictoral map, and it
had become a hug amount of work (initially for me and Karen, later for
Bill and Karen Shannon.)
Mark
This page last updated on:
Jul 1 09:16