[124721] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: What is "The Internet" TCP/IP or UNIX-to-UNIX ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jorge Amodio)
Sun Apr 4 11:02:15 2010
In-Reply-To: <4BB89C0D.2000007@cox.net>
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2010 09:57:12 -0500
From: Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@gmail.com>
To: Larry Sheldon <LarrySheldon@cox.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> UUCP is not a descriptor of any kind of a network in any engineering
> sense that I know of. =A0It is a point-to-point communications protocol.
You should revise some of the history behind it. It was a descriptor
for a very large network, it was even a TLD in the mid eighties when
the transition to DNS was taking place, the old bang style addresses
like mine original seismo!atina!pete transitioned for a while to
pete@atina.UUCP and later to pete@atina.ar.
UUCP was not just a point to point protocol. Originally it was a set
of utility programs to permit copying files between Unix systems (Unix
to Unix CoPy, hence the name), since electronic emails where
essentially files UUCP became the transport mechanism for both
electronic email and later Usenet News.
Some referred to UUCP as Unix to Unix Communications Protocol, not
quite right but yes one of the pieces of UUCP (uucico =3D Unix to Unix
Copy in Copy Out) implemented different type of communication
protocols negotiated during the initial handshake phase and fine
tuned to different communication facilities, point to point, telephone
modems, specific modems such as Telebit Trailblazers with PEP,
different types of encapsulation using X.28, X25, and obviously
TCP/IP.
For several years until we've got a more decent telecommunications
infrastructure UUCP was all we had in Argentina to let the academic
and science community reach out and communicate with their colleagues
around the world, we had an adapted version of the UUCP implementation
for DOS (some called it UUPC) that became very popular and enabled our
"UUCP network" to reach over 800 nodes in the early 90's when we later
were able to get a direct (IP) connection to the rest of the world.
My .02
Cheers
Jorge
