I once spent an unhappy six months very early in my career working in the IT shop of a fifth-rate telephone company's R&D center, where we had both Unix and VMS. The VMS C compiler came out and I eventually got UUCP working on VMS, which I cleverly called UVCP. I could never make it 100% reliable, there was something in the VMS terminal driver that randomly lost characters and I could never get the recovery code to work right. But a couple tries and your data would eventually go through. That wasn't the bad part; the bad part was when our pointy-haired power-crazed IT Director decided we should go into the software business and started selling it. Which meant I had to take support calls from the customers who didn't think that it was OK that it worked except when it didn't. In a rare exhibition of corporate justice, the IT Director was summarily fired one day.
On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 11:05 AM Dave Crocker <dhc2@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
(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.
