How the Mac was born... supposedly...

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Wed Jan 12 16:36:59 2005

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Al Kossow wrote:

> In the unix world, uucp and netnews, both using bang separated
> pathnames. Tom could explain the details of FIDOnet, which had
> gateways. Then there were all the other corparate/educational
> nets with their own naming rules (bitnet,decnet and dec's internal
> networks). Most people had slow point-point links at the periphery.

In FidoNet, every node (host) in the net has a complete map of the
network. The first pass was a simple "host" file ala /etc/hosts,
but it ended up a distributed/assembled reasonably smart symbolic
thing. It never fully did what I thought it ought to -- use the
echomail mechanism to redundantly distribute nodelist fragments
from which your system would assemble on the pieces you needed.

(Echomail was a multiply-redundant, self-healing,
amorphously-connected database system used to deliver "echo" mail,
the functional equivelant of USENET. It was developed by Jeff Rush
("The Shadow", Dallas TX) not me. It used FidoNet (FSC001) as a
transport mechanism. Echomail is a spectacularly wonderful
mechanism. There was even a robust voting system developed using
it, and people don't come in flavors more paranoid than FidoNet
sysops; if it pleased them it's gotta be good.)
Received on Wed Jan 12 2005 - 16:36:59 GMT