Actually, although research was one of the original sites officially,
I didn't think they ran news until some time into the game.
At the Winter 80 (January) Usenix I gave a short talk announcing the
creation of Usenet and inviting anyone to join. We even had printed up
little forms for folks to fill out giving their uucp info, etc.
(Sadly, I don't think any of these have survived.) There were two
incentives for folks to be interested.
First was supposed to be the news software itself. Since we expected
traffic on the order of a handful of items a week, one of the design goals
was that the news system be a useful tool for strictly local use.
(Which as already noted, led to the use of the "NET." prefix for non-local
news.) We had to convince people to pick up the software for its own sake
and then hope they would find it easy and convenient to tie into network
news as well. Or so we thought. In retrospect it clearly was the net-wide
aspect of news that attracted everyone's attention.
Second we felt we needed to get across the idea that Usenet was already
a fully-functioning non-local network rather than the patchwork of
hopes and scripts that really existed. By this time we did have a uucp
connection to research at Bell Labs thanks to Dennis Ritchie and Tom Truscott.
But I don't recall that they ran news. (Steve B - just what state was the
news software in at all at that point, anyway?) We put them on the map
that was displayed at the conference anyway as a Usenet "site".
(So the confusion between uucp-net and Usenet dates back to here!)
Dennis wouldn't let us name research though out of fears that BTL management
wouldn't like the idea so I had to refer to it as an unnamed research site
with a dot over on the East Coast.
This was the first Usenix I'd ever been to so I was rather nervous
but it seemed to go well. Made everyone laugh and applaud when I described
Tom's homebrew autodialer! It seems like it was only a few days after the
talk that our first site requested a connection - Reed college in Portland, OR
of all places. They had no dialer either so we had to call them - they were
willing to be billed for the charges. I don't recall if we ever billed them
or if we were ever paid, but Duke's department Chairman at the time seemed
very willing (to me) to foot some expenses to get Usenet off the ground.
Then there was a long drought and I don't recall who the next site added was.
I do recall that for a long while after Berkeley and Research were providing
cross-country connectivity, the connections were often very wasteful.
One of the worst examples was that Tektronix, in Oregon, couldn't send
e-mail to some other site (Reed?) a local phone call away because it was
against policy to set up the connection. But they could, and did, send mail
via Berkeley/Research/Duke going cross-country twice to reach a local
phone call away!
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16