Classic Comp UUCP network.

From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org>
Date: Sat Feb 9 13:34:14 2002

On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Jay West wrote:

> Ok, I have been watching the UUCP network thread. I have one question
> - WHY?

I think the pursuit of this is motivated by many of the same reasons
people are interested in vintage hardware.

For me, it would be the opportunity to play with UUCP. I've always been
curious about how the whole thing works. My first exposure to Unix and
Usenet was on a system with a UUCP based Usenet feed. Since those days,
I've had plenty of opportunity to configure almost every Unix based
service under the sun due to work related neccessity. The primary
expection being UUCP.

Other people on the list may have used UUCP in the past on the types of
systems they now collect. For them, it would be a matter of nostalgia
and the ability to enhance their hobby by engaging in it with other
people who have similar interests. e.g. The vintage computer hardware
hobby, now runs vintage software which is used to communicate with
like-minded hobbyists.

Supporting something like this helps to preserve, and possibly
highlight, yet another aspect of computer history. The world--especially
the computer industry--has a very short attention span, and it has an
even shorter memory. For the past year or so, industry figureheads are
ranting and raving about the wonders of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking.
Few of them seem to remember that UUCP is exactly that and that it has
been around for a few decades. The details of current P2P implementations
have changed, but the fundamental concepts are the same. Napster didn't
invent P2P.

I think the idea of having an independent netnews system is pretty
interesting. Using sendmail to handle messaging over UUCP would be fun.
I've no clue how to do this, as TCP/IP has always been present on all
the systems I've used. Experimenting with filesharing over UUCP would
likewise be educational, at least for me.

Whether there are enough people with enough resources and interest to
maintain this sort of endeavour, I don't know. My impression,
especially after reading some of the _Managing uucp and Usenet_ book, is
that UUCP died out in part because of there being too many different
ways to configure a system depending on your hardware, your OS, your
version of UUCP, and your modem type. Some of the can be eliminated by
using simple, and now prevalent, TCP/IP connections. For those unable
or unwiling to taint the purity of this experiment, dial-up gateways
would be needed.

So, if someone asks "Why?" what specifically do they mean? Is their
question, "Why would you use UUCP when you can use TCP/IP?" Or is it,
"Why would you used UUCP when you can't use it to access the web or FTP
or to have realtime chats with people?" That sort of reasoning doesn't
really follow with nature of the people who camp out here. You may as
well be asking, "Why would you use that PDP-8 when you could be running
Windows 2000 or Linux on a 1.6GHz Pentium IV PC?" Or, "Why do you run
RT-11? There aren't any MP3 players for it and you can't play any of
the new games on it."

Actually, I'm sort of surprised we aren't already running an extensive
UUCP network... The only reason I can guess as to /why that is/ would be
that everyone's too busy collecting old computer systems to actually do
something on a grander scale with them.

-brian.
Received on Sat Feb 09 2002 - 13:34:14 GMT