Thanks,
-Michael Hauben
hauben@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu
Tom Truscott had worked for Bell Labs over the summer. Since he knew
the folks at research, it was easy for him to get them to poll duke to
pick up news. That machine got out of the relay business comparatively
early, but a few others at the Labs -- mhtsa, vax135, allegra, ihnp4 --
picked up the slack. As noted earlier, it was mostly a matter of
personal initiative, and often management that either didn't notice,
or actually approved of, the use of resources.
At DEC, the impetus was a few far-sighted individuals who wanted to
improve relations between DEC and the UNIX community. This was an easy,
and very visible, way to do it.
As for AT&T's role per se -- the existence of uucp made netnews possible,
in the form in which it was originally conceived. I think that that
was one of the key elements that led Tom and Jim Ellis to the original
idea. Certainly, netnews followed quite quickly on the heels of uucp
(which was part of 7th Edition; in fact, I retrofitted it to 6th Edition
UNIX, since unc wasn't able to upgrade that quickly).
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16