Poofy Goof Rant-O-Matic

UUCP, Unix-to-Unix CoPy, is a store-and-forward protocol used primarily for mail, news, and copying files. the loose newsgroup network known as USENET was implemented largely on UUCP. since the advent of accessible packet-switched networking (AKA the internet), UUCP is now only used in rare cases. I still wax fondly over it.

originally users of the USENET had to manually route messages between nodes, using "bang path" addressing. email addresses were usually published with paths starting from well known hubs, like a large company or university. my first email address was ucsd!crash!pnet01!tfinn, but the ucsd gateway could also be substituted with nosc, or hplabs!hp-sdd. in 1984, Peter Honeyman and Steven Bellovin wrote a program called pathalias, which used map files published on the USENET group comp.mail.maps, to generate a "least-cost" path from your local node to any other USENET-connected node, saving a bit of typing, and if the maps were up to date, an optimal routing path. later versions allowed for using the internet as a gateway, so the closest internet-connected gateway for a given system could be used. when I connected my system to Reed with UUCP, I was reachable as reed.edu!vla!agrier.

my first exposure to UUCP was in 1991 through a BBS system in San Diego (El Cajon) run by Bill Blue. the system, People Net, ran Waffle BBS software, which allowed passing of email via UUCP. Bill ran pnet01, which served as the gateway for the people net system to the rest of USENET. in the early 90s, he got a 56k leased line to the internet, and offered paid access to the SCO unix system (crash.cts.com) under which Waffle ran. as USENET newsgroup traffic continued to rise, he moved to commercial space (shared with retailer Datel Systems) so he could expand his number of phone lines and get an actual T1. I rode along from BBS to full-fledged ISP, paying the new subscription fees from my paper route money, often in person. Bill continued to serve as an internet gateway for people net and other business via UUCP.

when I arrived at Reed College in 1994, UUCP was in the twilight of its life. the pacific northwest was pretty active in USENET but by 1994, most sites had shut down UUCP and moved on to the internet. as the designated modem wrangler at reed, I revived the UUCP node there in 1995, passing traffic with eaglet, cumulus, q7, and my own node, vla. traffic levels were almost non-existant, but Joey did use reed as a backup when q7 was offline for a couple days due to network migration. when I left in 1999, it was clear that UUCP was dying a natural death, and in August 2000, the final postings were made to comp.mail.maps by the UUCP mapping project.

leftovers from the UUCP mapping project still remain in a few places: ftp://ftp.uu.net/uumap/ ; http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/maps/uucp.bak/ ; google groups. I have a local copy of the final postings to comp.mail.maps, and even though the majority of entries were obsolete even then, almost all of the people who ran the nodes are still around.

I continue to be fascinated by the mapping project, since USENET maps tracked social networks. passing traffic was an agreement between the nodes involved, be it strictly social, academic, or business-related. doing a breadth-first search starting at my own node (vla), I can find a significant portion of the local geeks I know in just a few hops. I'd like to modify pathalias to write output suitable for graphviz, but that's a project for another day.