Yes, mostly because major sites at both companies served as big distribution
points for quite a while. "decvax" and "ihnp4" (this cryptic name comes
from AT&T internal naming conventions) shipped a lot of bytes around, and
swallowed some big phone bills, for several years early in Usenet's history.
(Actually, a number of AT&T sites other than ihnp4 were prominently involved
too. I think decvax was most of DEC's role.) Here too, mind you, a small
number of individuals -- the sysadmins at those sites -- played important
roles, promoting such usage and defending it as worthwhile for the company.
>(I take it AT&T did start it all by distributing UUCP with Unix.
>Was this at a point in time when Unix was easily available?
Academically, yes. Commercially, no.
Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16