I trust you mean sdcsvax.
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?
There was a strong mentality that the main cost was the phone bills,
and since nobody saw the phone bills, it was free. In the early days
the net was kept alive by a few SA's who followed Grace Murray Hopper's
immortal words: "It's much easier to get forgiveness than permission"
and just did it. Getting a dedicated machine required money which
required permission and justification - this is happening now in many
places but was hard early on.
The first key machines in this regard were research (for mail) courtesy
Dennis Ritchie and Tom Truscott, and vax135 (for Netnews) courtesy
Howard Katseff. (Of course, duke was key sooner than that, but it was
official at duke, and they didn't pay the phone bills. Ditto for
ucbvax (courtesy many people for email but I was SA for Netnews), which
was a west coast hub but didn't dial anybody.)
After vax135, chico (later harpo) courtesy Brian Redman, and then
Armando Stettner put decvax in as the major phone-bill hub.
After that, the backbone started to form and many sites pitched in, but
the cast of characters changed over time as the SA who kept a
particular machine alive left and the machine gradually decayed or
*whoomp* vanished as management pulled the plug. Many times downstream
sites suddenly found themselves without a feed and had to make sudden
arrangements.
ihnp4 was different. It had official support from the beginning,
thanks to Gary Murakami. However, when Gary left, it didn't vanish,
because it had official support. Doug Price stepped in and did an
outstanding job. ihnp4 finally went away, not because a person left,
but because of a change in heart from management. AT&T decided to
support Netnews (indeed, I lead that project right now) and provide
dedicated machines for it, but at the same time wanted to get off the
backbone. A department head bought a piece of shrink-wrapped software
and found it contained instructions to get support by email: mail to
ihnp4!system!support. He was so tee-ed off at this, and got agreement
from other dept heads, that pass-through email was banned. We were
told to become a leaf, which we largely have done. ihnp4 was finally
decommissioned when att became available as an officialy sanctioned and
supported gateway to take its place (but not forward 3rd party email.)
Mark
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16