[124771] 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 20:39:11 2010
In-Reply-To: <19385.11469.542125.882532@world.std.com>
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2010 19:38:37 -0500
From: Jorge Amodio <jmamodio@gmail.com>
To: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> I remember around 1987 when Helsinki (Univ I believe) hooked up
> Talinn, Estonia via uucp (including usenet), who then hooked up MSU
> (Moscow State Univ) and the traffic began flowing.
I bet that there many histories, perhaps those that didn't have access
to modern communications and vast resources were able to appreciate
much more what was possible to do with uucp.
I can tell for sure that in one instance it saved the life of a little
kid in the north of Argentina.
This kid had some rare disease and the rural doctor that was attending
him didn't know how to treat him, but he had a pc an a modem and he
was one of the nodes using the dos uucp implementation and he sent us
an email (in the postmaster role I always got requests as if I were
the index or 411 service on the networking those days) asking how to
get in contact with somebody to get help.
We were able via PAHO (Panamerican Health Org) to find somebody that
had a contact at WHO (World Health Org) which helped us to locate some
doctor familiar with that disease. We finally got in touch via email
with a Japanese doc who help the Argentinean doc treat the little kid
and he survived.
This was not the classic send me $1 for the sick kid scam, it was very real.
Regards
Jorge
