The Internet is an amazing place, and occasionally you can find things on the web that have somehow lingered online for decades longer than you might expect.
Today I’ll take you on a tour of some parts of the early Internet.
The Internet, of course, is a “network of networks” and part of its early (and continuing) promise was to provide a common protocol that all sorts of networks can use to interoperate with each other. In the early days, UUCP was one of the main ways universities linked with each other, and eventually UUCP and the Internet sort of merged (but that’s a long story).
Let’s start with some Usenet maps, which were an early way to document the UUCP modem links between universities. Start with this PDF. The first page is a Usenet map (which at the time mostly flowed over UUCP) from April of 1981. Notice that ucbvax, a VAX system at Berkeley, was central to the map.
ucbvax continued to be a central node for UUCP for more than a decade; on page 5 of that PDF, you’ll see that it asks for a “Path from a major node (eg, ucbvax, devcax, harpo, duke)”. Pre-Internet email addresses used a path; eg, mark@ucbvax was duke!decvax!ucbvax!mark to someone. You had to specify the route from your system to the recipient on your email To line. If you gave out your email address on a business card, you would start it from a major node like ucbvax, and the assumption was that everyone would know how to get from their system to the major node.
On August 19, 1994, ucbvax was finally turned off. TCP/IP had driven UUCP into more obscurity; by then, it was mostly used by people without a dedicated Internet connection to get on the Internet, rather than an entire communication network of its own. A few days later, Cliff Frost posted a memoir of ucbvax; an obscurbe bit of Internet lore that is fun to read.
UUCP was ad-hoc, and by 1984 there was an effort to make a machine-parsable map to help automate routing on UUCP. This was called the pathalias project, and there was a paper about it. The Linux network administration guide even includes a section on pathalias.
Because UUCP mainly flowed over phone lines, long distance fees made it quite expensive. In 1985, the Stargate Project was formed, with the idea of distributing Usenet by satellite. The satellite link was short-lived, but the effort eventually morphed into UUNET. It was initially a non-profit, but eventually became a commercial backbone provider, and later ISP. Over a long series of acquisitions, UUNET is now part of Verizon. An article in ;login: is another description of this history.
IAPS has an Internet in 1990 article, which includes both pathalias data and an interesting map of domain names to UUCP paths.
As I was pondering what interesting things a person could do with NNCPNET Internet email, I stumbled across a page on getting FTP files via e-mail. Yes, that used to be a thing! I remember ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com.
It turns out that page is from a copy of EFF’s (Extended) Guide to the Internet from 1994. Wow, what a treasure! It has entries such as A Slice of Life in my Virtual Community, libraries with telnet access, Gopher, A Statement of Principle by Bruce Sterling, and I could go on. You can also get it as a PDF from Internet Archive.
UUCP is still included with modern Linux and BSD distributions. It was part of how I experienced the PC and Internet revolution in rural America. It lacks modern security, but NNCP is to UUCP what ssh is to telnet.
@jgoerzen
Paging @peterhoneyman ^
Around 1992, my father (who worked in the same university I am now) took me to talk with the head of the Academic Services Computing Department. They ran the Internet connection since 1989 if I recall correctly; I was 16 year old or so, and was an avid BBS user and sysop, interested in getting involved in this world of telecommunications.
He lent me a book they had just bought at the library, The Whole Internet User Guide and Catalog, by Ed Krol. He had the project to create a similar catalog of Internet resources of interest to Spanish speakers, and told me he would be interested in me doing a first exploration of the concept.
Of course, the world of Internet services was just starting to boom, and the idea soon showed to be an impossible task (and, if anything, not something you’d task a high school student to do in his spare time).
By late 1993, I was providing my BBS users with the first free Internet e-mail connectivity in Mexico; sadly I don’t remember the full path, but my BBS (running VirtualBBS) used a local gateway over Waffle, then connected to Public Image Limited (pil) over UUCP, which connected to the Internet “proper” (lets call it “system.org”). So, by then, I was system.org!pil!catarsys!werewolf — I found it was possible to use the reverse notation with “%”, so I prefered the more readable werewolf@catarsys%pil%system.org UUCP path.
FWIW, I never returned the Guide and Catalog to the university library (sorry!), but found it over a decade later under insurmountable layers of different papers I left at my mom’s when I went to live by myself. It is probably not useful anymore other than as a memory of a very different network.
Hi Gunnar, thanks for sharing these memories — I’d enjoy hearing more, if you ever care to write about it. I too hav ea copy of the Whole Internet User Guide and Catalog, and it is fun to flip through it. You’re right; it’s sort of an accidental history now, but as that, I think it is even more valuable. I mentioned it in my own story at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10417-the-pc-internet-revolution-in-rural-america
I also ran VirtualBBS (under OS/2, in my case) for awhile, and had Internet email via a FidoNet gateway for a spell. Then I migrated it to FreeBSD and then Linux, and in the process got UUCP going.
I also briefly used %-routing, though it looked a little different. My ISP at the time was southwind.net, and my UUCP account was “Ucomplet”, so until I got my domain registered — which took some time (weeks?), I was jgoerzen%Ucomplet@southwind.net.