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

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 @ 23:05 +0000, Mike Meredith said:

> On Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:48:18 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > I understood you the first time, I just question the validity of it.
> > 
> > No machine in the maps was any more well known than any other.  It was
> > just an entry in the database like any other.
> 
> My distant memory of uucp/UseNet tells me that many people had multiple
> bang paths in their sigs. Given that the average email user was
> somewhat more clueful then than now, I would guess that they had a
> reason for doing so.

Yes, you sometimes had multiple addresses or unreliable addresses, just
like today.

Also, sometimes people gave more than one bang path because one was
their global path which you could get to from anywhere (using maps), and
the others were often faster routes for people on the same UUCP network
or a network hop away.

I did that too.

The world knew me as odu!waggen!escape!shendrix, however any people
in the local UUCP net could just use escape!shendrix instead, or even
waggen!shendrix which was auto forwarded.

The downside of those kinds of paths is that if someone saved them and
tried to use them from another physical location, they would not work.

Only paths in the maps were completely portable.

> Did uucp maps have a mechanism for expressing how quick and reliable
> particular links were ? 

Not all of the host OS versions did, but Taylor UUCP did.

It had more features than I ever used.

> I would guess that without that, email over uucp could be very
> variable in reliability and speed.

Yes, but the OPs point wasn't about reliability or speed, it was about
ucbvax being more "well known" and central, and that's not true.

Any well maintained machine in the maps was generally very reliable by
definition, and it gave you a bang path that could be used to reach you
or your machine from almost anywhere.

> Also wasn't it necessary to manually install the map ? If it changed
> frequently, an outdated map could cause problems.

No, that could be automated.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["If you tell the truth, you don't have to
remember anything" -- Mark Twain]