[geeks] nerd reading for a Friday night ... old-skool waxed

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 11:05:36PM +0000, Mike Meredith wrote:
> Did uucp maps have a mechanism for expressing how quick and reliable
> particular links were ? I would guess that without that, email over
> uucp could be very variable in reliability and speed. Also wasn't it
> necessary to manually install the map ? If it changed frequently, an
> outdated map could cause problems.

You don't really understand, having been brought up on a world of constant
connections. In those days, computers dialed other computers, often at
night when the phone rates were cheap. 

Rich people and companies had permanent connections, but you could buy
a new car each month with your telephone bill. Dial ups were scheduled
and not always every day. 

A business which depended upon email might dial up every hour. Ones that
were less dependent had smaller budgets, or were farther out, dialed up
every night. Some dialed up once a week.

It was possible to send an email on Monday, have it not delivered to
the following Monday because of a weekend dial up schedule, and get a
response the next Monday.

If you were at the wrong end of the polling list it could take
days to get a message. For example, if the site that sent it was called
after yours, it took a day for the message to be forwarded. If there
were several "hops", then it could take days.

One company I consulted for in around 1990, had a 4800 bits per second
line between Philly and Erie Pa. At $1.25 1/4 mile, you can figure out
the expense (plus several hundreds of dollars for the modems, line fees,
etc). They added a statistical multiplexer to use the line when it was
not active and added data compression, which gave them 3-4 times the throughput.

On one of the ports of the MUX, at my urging they installed an X.25
connection between the main Novell lan and the one in Erie. It took well
over a minute to load files, but that was far better than a day or two
to send a floppy by mail.

Geoff.
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