Usenet really was a P2P network, it’s just that the peers were mainframes and minis (and rarely, PCs) and the physical network layer was dial-up modems.
This was really visible to users, because the From addresses on posts were paths showing how the post had reached you, like foo!bar!baz!snej meaning I had posted to baz, which forwarded to bar, which forwarded to foo, which forwarded to whatever host you were reading it on. You could direct-message people and your message would follow the same path in reverse. It was pretty unreliable, though, and it took days to get bounces.
Here’s a readable version of the map, rescued from the Wayback machine:
Which would be helpful, but, according to the article: “The machine names are real, but the connections are drawn at random.”
This is a demonstration of graphs that were drawn at the time, not the (or even a) graph.
Ceci n’est pas un chat…
Usenet really was a P2P network, it’s just that the peers were mainframes and minis (and rarely, PCs) and the physical network layer was dial-up modems.
This was really visible to users, because the From addresses on posts were paths showing how the post had reached you, like
foo!bar!baz!snejmeaning I had posted to baz, which forwarded to bar, which forwarded to foo, which forwarded to whatever host you were reading it on. You could direct-message people and your message would follow the same path in reverse. It was pretty unreliable, though, and it took days to get bounces.version with proper formatting