[TUHS] UUCP Maps

[Aaron J. Grier]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 03:21:08PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> And perhaps a bit more importantly, does he still have the raw data
> that drove creating the maps?

I have a late snapshot from just before comp.maps.uucp was shut down.  I
also recall grovelling ftp sites for historic data, and finding some at
ftp.uu.net, now dead.  uucp.org also had map files and lookups
available, although it also seems to be dead now.

> It would be very interesting to see and compare those byte counts
> against today's internet. (I'm also very curious to see the relative
> flow between the hubs, and how data fanned out from them.)

the maps didn't contain byte counts, AFAIK.  the data rates were self-
reported, so were likely not terribly accurate.

by the time I got involved with UUCP, the mapping project was in its
twilight, and I recall numerous errors in my local (u.usa.or)
neighborhood.  I fixed up what I could, and even made contact with and
resurrected a few links.  (one of them actually used UUCP to pass email
traffic during a network changeover.)

the UUCP maps revealed a very coarse social topology, a lot of which I
think is still active today.  I don't think it was common to pass high
levels of traffic with strangers unless you were doing it on a
commercial basis.  :)

> I remember when the newsgroup traffic on Usenet hit 5 MB/day.  I think
> that was the third "death of the net" predicted event.

I still have an "imminent death of the net" button around here
somewhere.  :)
(http://photos.vec.com/Blog/2011-08/Blast-From-the-Past/i-9KKNPj3)

when I was still in my larval phase at my alma mater in the latter half
of the 90s, one of the two available T1s was constantly filled with
usenet traffic.  (we didn't carry binary groups.)  the feed itself was
handled by a sequent symmetry (dynix) with fujitsu supereagle(?) drives
for the spool, exported to ultrix decstations (and later OSF/1 alpha)
via NFS.  as I was exiting my larval phase, nntp was replaced with the
"on-demand" dnews running on the alphas.  (the sequents were also
retired, which subsequently broke the HVAC due to lack of load...)

I tried for a while in the early 00s to get diablo
(http://www.openusenet.org/diablo/) running under NetBSD, but never
figured out the right incantation to get it to pass socket descriptors
between processes.  (ObTUHS: what is the history of this ability?)

more recently (IE within the last few years), eternal september looked
promising, and while I could get trn to authenticate to read news, I
couldn't figure out how to get inews to handle authentication for
posting.

I digress...

-- 
  Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | agrier at poofygoof.com