Even in a small net it didn't take long before the Path: lines were huge
(obviously inefficient for replies) and even worse, simply wrong, since
they included paths that did not pass mail. Pathalias, for uucp
mailing, was necessary. It never fully worked, of course, and internet
domains and forwarding took over eventually.
It started with the principle that new sites on the net announced their
presence by filling in a standard form found in the news software and
posting it to the newsite group. People used to read that group!
Then the trend went to filling out the forms in a formal way, so that they
could be parsed.
I suggested to (I think) Mark that we add longitude and latitude questions
to the standard map form, for obvious reasons of making a visible map. It
was many years later that the first visiual maps were made, and Brian Reid
of DEC is the current guru.
The first ASCII maps were made by hand, just for fun. We all wanted to see
what this monster we were creating looked like.
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16