What’s Forgotten Internet? It is the story of parts of the Internet — or Internet precursors — that you might have forgotten about or maybe you missed out on them. This time, we’re looking at Unix-to-Unix Copy, more commonly called UUCP. Developed in the late 1970s, UUCP was a solution for sending messages between systems that were not always connected together. It could also allow remote users to execute commands. By 1979, it was part of the 7th Edition of Unix.
Operation was simple. Each computer in a UUCP network had a list of neighbor systems. Don’t forget, they weren’t connected, so instead of an IP address, each system had the other’s phone number to connect to a dial up modem. You also needed a login name and password. Almost certainly, by the way, those modems operated at 300 baud or less.
If a computer could dial out, when someone wanted to send something or do a remote execution, the UUCP system would call a neighboring computer. However, some systems couldn’t dial out, so it was also possible for a neighbor to call in and poll to see if there was anything you needed to do. Files would go from one system to another using a variety of protocols.
Under the Hood
While UUCP was the name of the system (and UUCPNET the network of all computers reachable by UUCP), there were actually a few programs only one of which was named uucp. That program was the user’s interface to the system.
Other programs included uux for remote command execution, uucico which was the backend, and uustat which provided status information. Every hear of uuencode and uudecode? Those started here and were meant to convert binary to text and vice-versa, since you couldn’t be sure all the modems and computers could handle 8-bit data.
When uucico answers a call, it sends a Control+P along with a string indicating its host name. The caller responds with its own Control+P and host name, along with some options. If the caller isn’t recognized, the computer will hang up.
File Transfer
If the call continues, the caller can either send a file, request a file, send commands to execute, or ask for a hangup. Sending and receiving files or commands use g-protocol. Each packet was a Control+P, a number indicating packet size or type, a 16-bit checksum, the datatype, and a check digit for the header (the checksum didn’t cover the header).
The packet size was 1 to 8, corresponding to 32-4096 bytes. In practice, many small systems would only allow a value of 2, indicating 64 bytes. The size could also be 9 to indicate a control packet. There’s a lot of detail, but that’s the gist of it.
The g-protocol uses a sliding window system, which was innovative for its time and helpful, considering that systems often had long latencies between each other. In theory, a sender could have up to seven packets outstanding while sending data. In practice, many systems were fixed at a window size of three, which was not optimal for performance.
This led to the G-protocol (uppercase), which always used 4K packets with a window of three, and some implementations could do even better.
From the user’s perspective, you simply used the uucp command like the cp command but with a host name and exclamation point:
uucp enterprise!/usr/share/alist.txt alist.txt # copy alist.txt here from enterprise uucp request.txt starbase12!/usr/incoming/requests # copy request.txt to remote system starbase12.
You might also use uux to run a remote command and send it back to you. You could run local commands on remote files or vice versa using a similar syntax where ! is the local machine and kelvin! is a computer named kelvin that UUCP knows about.
Reading the Mail
An important use of UUCP was early e-mail. Mail programs would cooperate with UUCP. UUCP E-mail addresses contain exclamation points (bangs) to identify the whole path to your machine. So, if you lived in New York and wanted to send an e-mail to Hackaday in California, it might require this address: NY4!east.node!center!west.node!CA8!Hackaday!alwilliams.
It was common, then, to provide your e-mail address relative to some “well-known” node like “…!west.node!CA8!Hackaday!alwilliams.” It was up to the sender to fill in the first part. Your mail would travel through each computer. There could easily be more than one path to …!Hackaday!alwilliams even from the same starting point and there would almost certainly be different paths from different starting hosts.
Usenet was also distributed this same way. Usenet deserves its own Forgotten Internet installment, but it was an early form of what we think of today as discussion groups.
Keep in mind that in both cases, UUCP didn’t know anything about machines more than one hop away. It was up to the mail program to understand that it was running on west.node and that it should then dial up the CA8 computer and transmit the message to it.
Versions
[Mike Lesk] at Bell Labs originally developed the code, and by 1978, there was a UUCP network of 82 Unix machines internal to Bell Labs. Around 1983, there was an AT&T rewrite known as HoneyDanBer UUCP, referencing the authors’ names, that fixed some bugs.
Then [Ian Lance Taylor] wrote a GPL version in 1991, often known as Taylor UUCP. It was flexible and could communicate with other versions of UUCP. It could also go faster when talking to another Taylor UUCP instance.
There were UUCP programs for MSDOS, CP/M, Mac OS, and VMS. Probably even more than that. It was a very popular program.
All Good Things
Of course, full-time connections to the Internet would be the beginning of the end for UUCP. Sure, you could use UUCP over a network connection instead of a dial-up modem, but why? Of course, your phone bill would definitely go down, but why use UUCP at all if you can just connect to the remote host?
In 2012, a Dutch Internet provider stopped offering UUCP to the 13 users it had left on the service. They claimed that they were likely the last surviving part of the UUCP world at that time.
Of course, you can grab your modem and set up your own UUCP setup like [Chartreuse Kitsune] did recently in the video below.
Times were different before the Internet. It is amazing that over a single lifetime, we’ve gone from 300 baud modems to over 1 petabit per second.
300 Baud! The luxury! We used 45 baud on our Model 15s and liked it!
And running through the TWX network it would often get down to 1 character per second, but it was intercontinental text messaging in real time. Horrifically expensive though: roughly a hour’s pay to transmit a single page of a few dozen words.
And tell that to the young people of today and they won’t believe you.
Missed the era above by a few years.
When I was a early teen, dad brought home a ‘modem’ . The phone rubber cups type. Got into the Prime computer where he worked. Pretty cool for a this kid. Later in college is 300 Baud Hayes modem at first. I ‘think’ by the time I graduated I had a 2400 Hayes modem to call into the VAX from my DEC Rainbow. I’ve said it before, what was neat is Turbo Pascal came out around that time and ran on the Rainbow. So I could my CS homework at home disconnected and from VAX (keep phone available for calls) then just upload to VAX and compile up there. No fighting for a ‘terminal’ in the CS lab. Cool beans. Those were the days. Now you hear complaints about Internet Access is to slow… Need fiber, more bandwidth, etc. zzzzz . Kids.
2nd year of college, I acquired a KSR-33 and an Omnitec 701B modem. It lived in my dorm room. Rubber cups and a dorm phone (on campus calls were free) kept me connected to the mainframe, and a job as a TTY repair person got me unlimited mainframe time. The TTY cost me $150 and the modem was $350. Big bucks for a college kid, but it sure paid off, as I didn’t need to fight for terminal time or make the frozen trek down to the terminal room.
Things got even better in grad school, when I repaired and rebuilt a scrap DEC VT-05 and the same Omnitec modem ran at 300 baud!
You need to consume fiber to produce a well-formed stool. Try eating carbohydrates only and you won’t be able to fully wipe despite using 2 rolls of paper for every poop.
Carbs have plenty of fiber: fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, seeds, beans, peas, lentils etc. It’s the highly processed food that lacks fiber. Also, animal products like milk, cheese, and meat have zero fiber.
Well, just as soon as you make it so their homework only requires a few k of plaintext, maybe things will change. In the mean time, the internet is being asked to do the job of your tv, radio, shopping mall, movie theater / video rental store, arcade, library, etc. And on top of that, it’s being used for new things like video calls for meetings and classes and such, now that they’re practical. It’s going to need some more performance to handle all that.
Of course we need 2.5Gbit fiber internet.
How else are we supposed to get text as fast as we can read it, when every web page wants to load a 500MiB video as its background, then another 120MiB of ads(after the auction closes and someone pays for your pageview), before finally loading the 120KiB of relevant images and text?
Here are only so many cups of coffee to pour, or sandwiches to make, while I wait for a page to load…
…my god the internet is such shit nowadays.
Reminds me of vintage RTTY @45,45 Baud!
About ¾ of a century ago, hams had used obsolete 50 Baud telex machines (surplus) for RTTY.
Ever tried Amtor, old man? Or Pactor 1? They’re blazing fast @100 Baud. :D
Anyway, 300 Baud was primitive in terms of hardware,
it was cozy acoustic coupler speed (some good models had offered 1200 and 2400 Baud, too).
Minitel and BTX used 1200/75 Baud (down, up) via v.23 standard.
And it was a bit too slow to be fun. 9600 Baud or higher would have had been more practical.
Gratefully, late ISDN (64 kbit/s) showed how enjoyable BTX was on a quick connection, before it went EOL.
(CompuServe and AOL were similarly speedy via ISDN.)
That being said, it’s understandable why some homecomputer users stuck to 300 Baud in the 80s.
Their computers couldn’t do 1200 Baud reliable, it wasn’t the modem who was to blame.
The C64 was such a case, I think. That nasty little breadbox.
The default kernal settings for 1200 Baud stored in ROM were false (1198 Baud?)
and had to be programmed manually to make it work (via custom setting).
LUXURY. We used to get up at 10’o-clock at night to check the logs, sift a mile of paper tape, sneakernet a pallet of punch cards across the facility; nevermind dropping the stack and having to re-sort them one by one. Then at the end of the day (morning) the program produced a segfault and we’re required to work overtime re-sorting the cards until our backs broke from 100lbs of punched cards and paper tape logs.
When I was 15 I got a job at Tymnet hacking/playing with their network. They gave me a ASR 33 and a 300 baud acoustic coupler. I was in heaven. I did have to run my own phone wire from the demarc to my room. I remember my dad being upset having to buy a case of paper rolls.
Later when I was at the Pentagon I ran Pent-Tip and we ran 24 users doing text based word processing using nroff and troff on a PDP 11/45 with 12 300baud and 12 1200baud modems.
Fun fact: Perl still supports encoding and decoding uuencoded data.
https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/pack – the lowercase ‘u’ arg to pack() and unpack() will happily handle it, and as a plus, it’s dead simple to write a converter in it that can handle reading from stdin and writing to stdout, unlike the original uu* utilities. ;)
Isn’t that kind of like saying land lines still support pulse dialling? I mean, I don’t think the kids are using Perl itself much.
That said, lots of things still use uuencode’s slightly younger sibling Base64.
Most of them don’t, I believe it got retired here about 5-10 years ago.
In Italy hostels used to have rotary-dial phones with a little lock on the number 3 so that you could still call 112 in an emergency (same as 911 in the US or 999 in the UK). I learned how to pulse dial by tapping the hook and called home for free. This was a few years before cell phones.
… although… uuencoded data has nothing to do with UUCP, other than they both start with uu. Unix-to-Unix encoding, or uuencode, was written by Mary Ann Horton in 1980 as a means of safely sending binary files around (much communication at the time was text-based.). Ah, those were the days.
From the above article:
indeed, as used extensively on abpe….
It could be used for uucp… but it wasn’t designed for it. It was used for many years for other things as well. Email, ftp, shar files, you name it, very little had binary support those days.
Like sharing binaries via newsgroups in later years
Thanks for the article! It is refreshing to read about old technologies and think about how they could find niches in the new times. Started with a 1200 baud modem and a DOS XT clone. It was slow for the time as I think 2400 was the norm and 9600 was fast. Maybe 14.4 just came out shortly after. The really slow thing though was having to use pulse dialing. It couldn’t compete with those that paid extra for tone dialing. Fun times. Lots of adventures just sitting in front of the monitor and keyboard calling local BBS’s because long distance (something else kids today probably haven’t heard of) cost a lot of money even to the city next to you. Thanks again.
I think I have a 56k USR modem just like that up in the attic somewhere.
You can be happy that you didn’t use a modem that operated at higher than 9600 Baud:
The serial port chip, the 8250 UART, had no buffer.
This chip was often installed in old PC/XT systems.
Note: in practice, high baud rates often did work on plain DOS only, without multitasking environments loaded.
If the DOS communication software did everything by itself through careful timing, up to 115.200Baud were possible.
Early ATs (pre-586) had the 16450 UART FiFo, which had a broken buffer.
It was no better than the 8250, in practice.
In early 90s, as modems went faster, it was common practice to rip out 8250s and 16450s and replace them by good 16550s (16550AFN, for example).
Users of internal modems for PC bus/ISA bus often had a 16550 chip.
They shipped with their own COM port, so to say.
This was true for mid-80s era modems, even.
That being said, the 16 Byte FiFo had to be enabled by DOS utility or by the application itself.
Windows 3.11 had a FiFo setting in system.ini, for example.
That’s because the 16550 starts up in compatibilty mode, so that software expecting a 8250 or 16450 will be satisfied.
The 16550 also does cause less interrupts than the previous models, which is good for CPU performance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART
man that takes me back, even more than batched transfers did
i don’t remember what problem prompted the upgrade, and i can hardly believe WWIV didn’t support 16550 out of the box so i hope this isn’t a slander…but i clearly remember buying a 16550 and replacing a socketed 8250 on an ISA serial board. and i remember hacking WWIV (BBS) source to be able to read more than one character per interrupt request, and thinking “is that all it is?” this would have been around 1993-1995, for a 14.4k modem.
and a couple years after that it sank into me how ridiculous that experience was…i had to do all that work for 16 bytes of ram. these days, the southbridge is a million or billion times more complicated than that and you don’t think a thing about it.
Your experience sounds similar to mine. I started with a 1200bps modem, later went to 9600, 14.4k, maybe 28.8k (I might have skipped 28.8k), and then 56k, then DSL. 1200 wasn’t bad when it was all text. It was prohibitively slow when graphics started taking hold though, and when we started downloading large software packages by modem. At 9600, I remember keeping the phone line tied up all night while I slept, downloading software; and if it was a particularly big package, it might take two or three nights to get it all. I didn’t have any complaints, because waiting for a pile of floppy discs to arrive in the mail would have taken at least as long. I think it was when the second gulf war broke out that I could first watch same-day war video. I definitely didn’t have 56k yet, and maybe not even 28.8k, so it might have been 14.4k, and got a tiny video frame and only 16 colors; but the fact was that I could actually watch video. When we got DSL, in spite of many people thinking it’s super slow, two or three of us could be watching videos at the same time, with no slowing. Verizon kept coming to the door trying to sell us FiOS and saying “The copper is costing too much to maintain,” yet they wanted to switch us to FiOS for a much higher price than we were paying for DSL; and then they would tout that you could download a feature-length movie in some number of seconds, and I’d say, “What in the world use do I have for that? You might as well be trying to sell me a car than can go mach 3. Where am I going to use it?”
When our older son was in junior high, I got him on the Commodore 64, thinking that it would be much more likely to get him into programming and understanding the insides than if I had gotten him into PCs. He really got into it, and downloaded a lot of C64 software from a BBS 500 miles away, with the Commodore modem. I can’t remember if it ran at 300 or 1200bps. I asked him to only get on the BBS late at night when the phone rates were the lowest (this was in the summer when he didn’t have to get up early for school), but he still ran the phone bill up $70+ one month. (BTW, no, he didn’t do any games. He and I are definitely not games people.) He used GEOS a lot the next school year for writing papers, with GEO Write, GEO Paint, and maybe one other. The unfortunate discouragement was the lack of reliability of the Commodore disc drives.
One of the other programs was uuexec which ran a program, like rmail, on the remote system. Imagine the security issues with that!
Can we please cut out the “kids these days” nonsense in the comments please. For most of my childhood I was accessing the internet at 0 baud, so all you fat cats with earlier access can please cut down on the ageist comments.
All that said, thanks to HaD for the article, interesting to read more about UUCP.
Clearly not a Monty Python fan.
Only one of the comments referenced a Monty Python sketch (the Four Yorkshiremen sketch), the rest of the comments contained unfiltered disdain for the youth of today, as if it’s impossible to imagine slow networking.
Kids these days don’t respect the traditions of us cantankerous old men lamenting the state of the youth–an ancient part of human nature which will never be vanquished. Sad!
We had better old folks when I was younger; all these old folks nowadays don’t know how nice they have it.
Sure, how nice it must be to have old folks. In my day people died before they were even born. Sure go ahead and brag about your old folks. Sheesh…
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
-Socrates, possibly apocryphal, circa 5th century BC
Sure must be nice to be born, we had to incorporate ourselves from the primeval ooze on our own, and we were glad for the ooze.
Absolute truth
sorry. my cat brushed the screen at the “report” spot on the screen. may I suggest an “are you shure” popup?
Given that the cat was to blame, may I suggest the wording “I can haz confirmation?”
(Sorry.)
You had internet as a child? Luxury. We had sticks and rocks. On a good day the grown ups would toss us a coffee tin to put our sticks and rocks in.
With no internet, one actually got outside and played kick-the-can with the kids in the neighborhood getting some exercise instead of thumbs/wrists on joysticks :) . Built things. Rode bikes. Fished, hiked, no cell phones to distract. Life was simpler for sure. Go to your bank to do your banking, broker to do transactions, etc. Now if cell service was lost, I bet a lot of people would wonder how to pay bills…. Or even buy lunch at McDonalds (from what I have observed) ….
What? No NES or Atari, no walkie talkies? What sort of childhood was that? 🥺
My friends and me rode bikes, with our walkie talkies!
We also carried stuff like flaslights (pre-LED), compasses, a pocket transistor radio etc. Or played with our little r/c cars.
We also climbed some trees or did try to build a hideout in hidden places.
One was a big bush, I remember. Gratefully, it had no ticks inside.
Back then we kids were being way too careless at times.. sigh. 😮💨
“Hunter Tanner-Tucker-Trouper Smith! Stop lazing about on your phone and help me make the penpal send this poor prince some gift cards! I asked Microsoft while they were on my computer yesterday and they said he really needs the money!” – The sorts of things people say when cell service isn’t lost. It’s easy to get too proud of what you might hopefully be able to do in an outage (if anyone else is able to operate as your counterparty), while forgetting everything you struggle with when service is normal. And some people are proudly “not computer people” but give them a typewriter, slide rule, etc and they can’t hack it the old ways either. Alright, time to get off my soap box.
I remember playing outside with the neighborhood kids plenty and wish it was still possible nowadays. Even then, some activities were only simple if you were a kid rather than the adults in the background providing supplies or transport or keeping track of vaguely where you’d run off to.
you aren’t going to groom a college girl into sleeping with you unc you can drop the virtue signaling💀💀💀💀
Do we have permission to debate the definition of “slow internet” with them? I mean there’s slow and then there’s SLOW!
Joking aside, it stands to reason that a group of people with similar life experiences relative to age and available tech are apt to have similar stories to share. Also, the tech may change but many of the experiences are still roughly analogous. I’ll wager that the disdain you think you’re hearing is actually tongue in cheek, i.e. to many, the “kids these days” comments are simply a familiar joke; an homage to both Monty Python and the old “walked to school, barefooted, in the snow, up hill, BOTH WAYS!” sort of things we say for a laugh without any malice or disdain insight. Alas the Internet does make it harder to detect.
So you had 0 baud growing up. Lots of us were in the same boat and there are plenty of people that still don’t. That doesn’t mean we can’t have similar tech stories to the ones shared above, can’t recognize or make a connection between them, and thus can’t appreciate the comments for what most of them are intended to be and that is humor.
good article! 1200 baud and faster began appearing early on—i think we had them in 1984. bits were encoded as di-bits. instead of pure tone signaling, the bits were encoded as phase changes.
many sites, ours included, used smart host software to automatically route through the network. for each site there was a corresponding usenet map entry giving details like contact, phone numbers, speeds, polling or on-demand (or both), availability times, who you connected to and at what speeds, and so on. you can search for “uucp maps” and look at some. once a month the maps would come down the feed and you had local software that crunched this to generate unique routes to anywhere in the maps from your system. you could still use your own bang paths, but domain addressing became available (“@“ sign) which let the smart host do the work. there were several addressing variations.
early social media was carried on either “news” or “notes”. the difference was how the info was formatted and propagated. there was a lot of activity. archie and veronica and gopher allowed remote site searches and delivery to your system automatically by ftp. we could do most what can be done now.
you could use the maps and hand route loop mail around the globe and back to your email/site. i could loop mail this way and get replies in 15-20 minutes. later map software would optimize routes dynamically to cut time.
!ihnp4, !decvax, and similar large vax systems were major hubs….
this is old tech—but not inept tech. old tech got us to the moon.
Bell 202 (1200 baud, HDX) dated before that. But 212 (1200 FDX), that was about right. I had a desktop unit, about the size of a sheet of paper – General DataComm, IIRC. No internal dialer, had to reach behind and push a button when the far end answered, then hang up the phone. I think it was a rack mount product, crammed into a case for the rapidly emerging dial-up market. Horrendously expensive, it was, too…$450? Later I got a used Hayes Smartmodem. Luxury!
“Later I got a used Hayes Smartmodem. Luxury!”
Normality. Sanity.
The previous modem probably wasn’t meant to be used by home users in first place.
It was rather meant as a part of an embedded system (nowadays terms) for a fixed application.
But that’s the problem with early tech.
It was meant to be used by certain operators, in a certain applications.
The advent of the smartmodem (or Hayes modem in my case) was no luxury, but rather a reasonable, natural development.
In my place, Germany, we had the infamous DBT-03 modem for BTX service (comparable to French Minitel).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Modem_DBT-03.jpg
That modem was built using hardware available in 1980
and contained a modem circuit, as well as a simple microcontroller.
It could do 1200 Baud down (receive) and 75 Baud up (user input).
And it had an auto-dial feature, of course.
It dialed the country wide BTX phone number, then it would transmit the user ID.
Both were stored in a pre-cursor of the EPROM.
All in all, it was like a primitive smartmodem.
It didn’t support a command language, though.
Dial up and disconnect were done via toggling RS232 pins.
I’m writing this to give a counter point of view.
Because that 1200 Baud modem was never really state-of-the-art.
Even in mid-80s, BTX over 1200 Baud was very slow.
The modem had been heavily being critized for its quality and performance.
The problem with the US, I think, is that the nation had an a** poor telephone network (to use street language).
300 Baud might have been the upper limit to many, because the line quality was so bad.
After re-union, we had seen same poor line quality in former East Germany (GDR), I think.
Like in the US, the telephone network was in the state of that of a third-world country.
The difference was that East Germany was poor and short on resources, though.
They had to use iron and steel wire instead of copper, so they couldn’t be blamed.
By contrast, the problem with the US probably was that it just was outdated and very big.
Which is understandable, considering that the telephone network was very old at this point.
So it would take a while to restore it back to good health to allow proper modem use.
I’m pretty sure that in a couple of weeks we’ll a hackaday.io project of a mesh of UUCP nodes over VoIP over WiFi on a PDP-11 emulated on ESP32 in a couple of weeks ;-)
Check out C*Net — they have a whole international dial-up phone network over VOIP.
Don’t forget to include TOSLINK.
Would make for a good Apr 1st RFC covering say EoUUCP or IPoUUCPoIP.
:-)
I know many places where UUCP is still in use. Often, but not exclusively, those are related to Pubnixens ans Usenet servers. You’ll find some hobbyists if you look for UUCP releated newsgroups in Usenet.
Yep, I still use UUCP (albeit using TCP/IP for transport instead of an analog modem line) for my mail services. It works rock solid and there is still no need to change that setup.
How would anyone without a phone tap know someone was still using UUCP? If they were using UUCP, why would they tell you?
“300 baud or less” is a bit of an overstatement. I worked in a computing center that had 1200 baud modems in the late 1970s, but they may have had specially conditioned lines. Yeah, teletypes were limited to 110 baud, but I don’t THINK there were any links that relied on punching paper tape from one teletype and feeding it to another…
Then everything went crazy in the 1980s. I remember paying $$$ for a 1200 baud modem I could use from the dorms (in place of my 300bps acoustic coupler), then having 2400bps show up almost immediately thereafter. And then the Telebit Trailblazers came along, cheerfully ignoring what we thought were Shannon’s laws for phone lines. I barely had time to covet them, though, before new standards and cheap mass-produced hardware surpassed them. I remember buying a 14.4k modem and using it for a little while before upgrading to 28.8. I probably still have a 56k modem or two lying around somewhere, but shortly after that we got “broadband” (such luxury, DSL down at 768k and up at 128k).
Well, it is like today. Yes, you can get QLED TVs but not everyone has them. A lot of small sites had old stuff and I’ve certainly banged out things on a 110 modem even if there was better things by the time I was doing it (mid 70s). Now I don’t know if they had something better for the UUCP connections, but my guess is no. Old tech stays in the channel for quite a while, especially when new tech was big dollars.
Those were the days! I went on holiday to Hong Kong and 28.8 modems had just come out there with the Rockwell chip.
As well as buying one for myself, I bought another 20, and flat-packed all the packaging for import to the UK. In those days you could put everything in a cardboard box and it would come with you on the 747 for free.
They sold like hot cakes! Didn’t quite pay for the trip, but, knocked a few quid off.
Yep, it was euphoric experience in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. You could actually ‘see’ change happening. Going from 25Mhz to 100Mhz was a monumental change in CPU performance. 8bit, 16 bit to 32 bit. 64K to 512K to a 1MB of memory… From 1200 to 9600 to 38.4K was tangible feel in bandwidth. Now going from 2.5G processor to 3.0 to 4.0, to 5.0… Or 1.0Gb to 2.5Gb ethernet … Basically the same ‘feel’ when working at a workstation in general. Only significant ‘feel’ change in ‘recent’ history was shift from HDD to SDD shift. Same with display tech — except maybe for the ‘gamers’ out there can notice differences. For the rest of us the ‘feel’ is the same, even though resolution is higher (which is a good thing.) . Of course price is so much lower compared to the old days in terms of what you get for the money… That is tangible. Still the ‘feeling’ isn’t there for tech today like it was. Take that back… SBCs, micro-controllers, we are seeing the ‘same’ changes as back in the 80s for home desktops… Take the little RPI Pico board compared to the UNO boards or PICs of just a few years ago. Makers and such really have it ‘good’ now (and still complain ;) Ha!) . Having 256K or 520K available and Megabytes of flash storage on tiny boards…. Unheard of.
NNCP is a somewhat new spin on UUCP
https://www.complete.org/nncp/
In my personal LAN I make use of UUCP to keep a number of things in sync. One of the most common misconceptions is that UUCP does not support LAN/WAN (e.g. TCP/IP). It was a very early “adopter” of the protocols. If it weren’t for ignorance, and even worse the snobbery of not using what already exists, people could have save themselves a great deal of pain and deployed and used it for much of what new software was written from scratch was.
i have nothing against uucp but i’m not sure what someone who ‘only’ has scp / rsync / git is missing
All of which are late comers to what was available to the Inertnet. Without getting in to a back and forth. An example could be. One wants to regularly on some sort of schedule transfer some files and have it restart if there is some interruption. That is inherent in UUCP the alternatives back then (perhaps even now) require program code to be written around them to achieve the same thing.
i agree it is an awesome power but i use crontab and rsync for that. this is a line from my crontab on my pc:
15 10 * * * rsync –partial -rt phone:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera /media/cams/phone
nothing wrong with using uucp or any other tool for that purpose i just don’t think there’s any reason to feel loss. the only reason uucp isn’t more widely used today is that everything it does is done by newer systems as well.
Lots of UUCP accounts (back in the day) didn’t have passwords (or had ‘uucp’ as the password), and most of them had shells enabled (and if they didn’t you could still likely use them). Great for poking around random UNIX boxes all over the global…
It’s a bit funny that one of the current lasting things from UUCP bang-path syntax is that fanfic writers often use bang-discriminators to differentiate different versions of characters, especially across different AUs. This practice can derive its lineage directly to UUCP email addresses!
YWNBAW
Back when I was a kid, Dad worked for an organization that used Vaxes for most of their computing needs. We had a MicroVax in our basement because for whatever reason, the phone lines at his office were unreliable for international calls, but were fine where we were. So work paid for a line at our house and all the international email came there first, before being sent onward to headquarters. A nice side effect of this was that all of us got email addresses out of it. We had a PC running Windows 3.1 and Pegasus Mail that would retrieve our email via UUCP over a serial cable from the MicroVax.
I never could quite explain to the librarian’s satisfaction how we had email, but not internet. (I think they were trying to get us signed up to see our checked-out books online or something).
Who were those last 13 users? Any source?
ROK
Paper!
SZA
I sometimes wonder if some of the old protocols could be revived as an antidote or even alternative to the dumpster fire that is the modern internet and ecosystem of specific apps for a specific service.
So… I didn’t use UUCP, but I see others here reminiscing about their early modems, so here’s my story… Not the first modem I used, but the first modem I bought as a young teen was a used, Atari SX212 1200 bps modem – which was slow at the time.
And what I loved about this modem was it had the loudest speaker I’ve ever heard on any modem. My computer was in the back corner of my parent’s basement, and I could set it to dial a BBS – if the line was busy, it would keep re-dialing. I could go upstairs, do something else, and I could hear it connect from another floor of the house, and know to go back downstairs.
When I bought a faster modem, I gave it to my younger cousin, and he used it…
I had the Atari 835 with a fire-sale 1200XL.
I spent a LOT of childhood BBSing, and war-dialing for MCI codes and free long distance. I learned to code on that, typing everything and porting stuff from Apple II and other platforms (I had access to every popular computer magazine at my parent’s store).
Got the 520ST later, but I was thoroughly disappointed with the bundled BASIC and couldn’t afford/justify the price of GFA BASIC or a C compiler. I used the ST for games and BBS’ing but still fired up the 1200XL for coding. It was just so well documented by that time.
I wish I didn’t toss the 1200XL in a move (1999) as I had the box, warranty card, styrofoam, everything and it’s worth a pretty penny now. Out of nostalgia I rescued an Atari 400 and an 800, cheap and mint too.
Once faster modem speeds were available 33.6 etc, I’d gotten a 486 and ran the DOS BBS program Telix. It was pretty amazing what you could do with a 1MB video card (POV-Ray running for 24 hours!)
When I finally found Linux, I was running a server using Monolith DDNS on a dedicated phone line (56K). Got a $1 discount on the phone bill since you “tone dialing” was extra-cost.
In the early/mid 90s used to use UUCP between Unisys 5000/50 (NCR Towers) and Xenix/286 machines. I absolutely hated it, it was so finicky to set up and very flakey when running. It was much, much much better using C-Kermit when that came along.
UUCP, perhaps not in its current form, gives an excellent model for inter-planetary communications. When you stop thinking about everything as instantaneous action-reaction and instead think more about planning for something to happen overnight, hour plus round trip times suddenly become not that big of a problem.
Prior to WWII, much of the US telephone network was switch by hand using human operators.
In the early/mid 1980s, you had to route your email by hand, by looking at a map of major connected nodes. Seriously.
My first online service was GEnie, before the http://www. I remember it could be quite a chore to get email (which was text-only) to and from someone who had a different service.
Landline phone lines (POTS) brings 4 lines into the house, to wires for the first phone, and two for the second phone (Or eventually for the modem).
I’d like to know how to get UUCP up and running. The uucp groups still exist, such as comp.arch on google groups. The uucp program still exists on Linux, but what do you connect to to get these messages?
Thanks
In the 1990s, I used UUPC, an MS-DOS uucp program. I wrote a program WinBiff, an email notifier, for Windows 3.0 to report when I had new mail from UUPC. Eventually, I extended the program to report POP3 and IMAP4 email.
lol by the mid 80’s Telebit was optimizing its high speed modems for UUCP xmissions
and just by perchance I used uucp to USENET along with fidonet SDN on a dos 3.3 tandon 30 laptop
to publish the first copies of Pretty good privacy 1.0 for Phil Zimmerman June 5 1991
Ya I remember junior high 1978 or 79 being sat down in front of what I was told was the coolest thing ever, a powerful computer connected to another computer at the local community college. Inputs were Y or N to questions regarding future career paths. I essentially asked which job had highest pay for the least amount of physical labor. The machine went Chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk DING! and spit out ‘Truck driver’
Bakwaas