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