1) uucp mail was uncertain at best. The more hops in a bang-path,
the more likely it would be to disappear into a black hole. Thus,
having accurate maps and a path rewriter might ensure that mail would
get through.
2) news sometimes took a looong time to propagate from one end of the
net to the other in the days of uucp-only transfer (the impact of NNTP
and UUCP-over-TCP is not recognized by many). Having good maps would
help identify places where the news flow could be short-circuited to
improve propagation *and* reliability.
3) new sites coming on line needed to establish connections. Having
good maps helped identify sites where they could hook in.
4) having complete lists of sites helped cut down on namespace
collisions in the days before domain naming became commonplace.
--spaf
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16