Technical links and a growing volume

Mark Horton (mark@stargate.COM)
22 Oct 90 09:28:34 EDT (Mon)

There is one kind of underdeveloped string in this discussion of the
net's history that I would like to ask people to develop more fully.
(Actually there are about 50 such strings but this one piques my
interest most.) What I am curious about is how various systems
developed to deal with the ever-expanding volume of the net. Steve
Bellovin says that at the beginning the total daily volume over the net
was expected to be one or two articles a day. Obviously that didn't
last long. I remember when I first began to read the news in late
1984 the people here at UCSD who ran the main machine for news on
campus -- sdcavax -- were already talking about turning off news.
They complained that UUCP was tying up one of the ports five or six
times a day, just to download news. Sdcsvax was the Computer
Science faculty research machine and the faculty was getting unhappy
with the competition for resources.

Two years later when I first sat on the campus committee on
computing the issue was still there. The committee recommended that
the campus but a machine strictly for news and mail, which is what
happened in 1988 or so.

If I understand what has been said correctly, this whole thing began
with UUCP -- "a poor man's ARPANET"* -- at Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill.
What I would like to understand better is how things moved from that
start to the present means of handling the news. There has been
mention of siesmo as the main news machine for the net, UUNET, the
Telebit Trailblazer modem, and the Internet. How did each of these
come to be involved in the net and how did the net change as a
result? What other kinds of transmission links were there and how
did each of these address the growing problem of volume?

"The whole world wants to know" :-)

bj

* "USENET - A General Access" : Daniel, Ellis and Truscott, no date

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