(when searching on 'uucp' be sure to include 'unix', lest you end up
with pointers to quite a different topic...)
As I recall, uucp was indeed universal, quite early in the life of unix.
Routing was manual, source routing. Hence an 'address' specified each
node to be transited, producing potentially many exclamation marks in
the address/route. And yes indeed, this was at the email level, rather
than at any lower layers.
Eventually some major switching node emerged, permitting referencing
them as an anchor, without regard to the path to get to the major
switch. As I recall, there were separate apps that computed uucp
network maps. But I don't recall how those got used.
FWIW, for CSNet, we used the percent symbol, to indicate one hop, beyond
the arpanet. Hence user%csnet-host@csnet-relay. So, arguably, a hybrid
of global and relative addressing.
The hybrid -- and the resulting email address syntax -- could get
complicated -- and error-rone -- when additional email networks were
part of the transit, such as Bitnet.
Craig Patridge notes significant discussions needed, that produced the
profound benefit of finally getting agreement among operators of these
various, independent email services, to use the DNS MX record for routing.
d/
On 3/15/2022 9:54 AM, Steve Crocker wrote:
My nomenclature re uu* is fuzzy. I know there was a command to copy a
file from one Unix machine to another. I’m not clear on whether this
included routing to other machines or whether that was a higher level
protocol.
Steve
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 15, 2022, at 12:50 PM, vinton cerf <vgcerf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"UUCP routing" versus "UUNET routing"? UUNET did indeed offer UUCP as
its primary service but UUCP was implemented widely on all (?)
UNIX-based systems and likely on non-UNIX systems for interoperability.
