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

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 09:03:52PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> It doesn't matter. Eventually some upstream host does use its maps, and
> one well maintained host in the maps is as good as any other.
> 
> The only way to route in UUCP without maps was to specific the full bang
> path.

That's why DNS was invented. By 1990, DNS was fairly common on the large
systems, and many small ones. There was only one place to get a domain
name from, at it was free. 

I forget the sytax was it "%"? To send email using a combined UUCP/DNS
path. For example "gsm002%gsm at mendelson.com", or was it 
"gsm002!gsm at mendelson.com"?

There were also mailer aliaes using programs like smail or sendmail that
woudl convert email to a user to a bang path so that it would get delivered
to a non local, uucp only system.

The other popular option was a smart host. For example, leaf sites to mine
had me as their smart host, and I had uunet. Email to anything I did
not recognize, or to any domain name other than mine were forwared to uunet.

Smart hosts did not have be direct connections. You could send your mail
to a smart host that was three or four hops up the chain. It slowed things
down, but in those days, many people did not care.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667  Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 
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