On Thursday, December 02, 2010 11:19:33 am Randy Bush wrote: > boy, you folk sure remember a different uucp network than i do.
Well, I got in the uucp thing rather late, hooking up in 1991 or so. By then to get e-mail through uucico it was common practice to bangpath off uunet, or some other 'known' host that pathalias/smail could find in the maps. Or worse, to use a bangpath/FQDN frankenaddress. For news over uucp, at least with C-News, which I ran for a while, not so much a big deal as long as you properly passed the post upstream. Usenet is still the standard for decentralized information sharing, IMHO, and for better or for worse. To get files, you needed to know the path to the file; while you could bangpath all the way to the archive and uucp the file directly, it was more common to start at a known node (like uunet or decvax) and path from there, unless you had a full pathalias-aware uucp (I forget if HoneyDanBer did that or not, too many years since doing that). Web browsing through uucico was just a special case of getting a file, at least in the implementation I used. But would pathalias scale to billions of hosts? I don't know the answer; I know on the miniscule Apollo DN3500's I used at the time the pathalias part of the processing frequently took longer than the actual transfer. And even in those days of mostly text web pages, NCSA Mosaic took longer to render the pages into the pads than the other two parts.
