Classic Comp UUCP network.

From: Brian Chase <vaxzilla_at_jarai.org>
Date: Sat Feb 9 20:47:39 2002

On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Owen Robertson wrote:

> I think it would be great to have a network for/of people who are
> genuinely interested in computers and electronics and such. I feel
> that we need an open forum for collaboration, where ideas can be
> exchanged, rather that lost in a sea of meaningless chatter, which I'm
> afraid the Internet and Usenet are becoming, if they haven't already.
> It would be nice to see that the days of the computer hobbyist have
> not been completely extinguished by multi-billion dollar corporations.
> If such a network did come to exist, I would welcome the opportunity
> to be an active participant in its development. My only question is
> (question, not criticism): Why UUCP?

If the main goal were to create a better collaborative community, I
don't see UUCP as being any kind of prerequisite. I'd only suggest it
for the novelty of it. That and the fact that it does support vanilla
dial-up enabling a certain class of vintage computer users to support
it. One thing that's nice about UUCP is that peered systems would have
private logins. New systems could only peer with existing systems, and
they'd have to be /allowed/ onto the network.

For the scenerio of running a private netnews network, it'd probably
make the most sense to just use NNTP over TCP/IP. Again, the "in
network" servers would have to only allow traffic between themselves.
Maybe, we could gateway in some of the better groups from the regular
Usenet hierarchy, and then create a vunet.* (or whatever) hierarchy
which is only carried within the network.

Other things could be updated as well. We could use a group of LDAP
servers to manage things like UUCP routing info and mail aliases for the
network users. Things like e-mail originating from non-members (as
cross-referenced with the LDAP servers) would be bounced or dropped.

The idea would be that you'd be held accountable for your actions within
the community. If you spam people, you'd be banished. As someone else
mentioned in another thread, the idea is really more like creating a
distributed BBS system. Instead of having some single central system,
it'd be more like a union of cooperative systems that played by the same
ground rules and shared some core infrastructure.

But now we're not talking about vintage computers or software. We're
talking about vintage values--where there's a global network with the
intent to further education, research, collaboration, and general
discussion (pointless or otherwise). Personally, I'm sick of the over
commercialized monstrosity that the internet has become.

-brian.
Received on Sat Feb 09 2002 - 20:47:39 GMT