I fondly recall UUCP (and even more fondly, FidoNet), but man was it a pain to work with sometimes…sites disappearing, dropped messages, etc. There was a reason why people would often present multiple bang paths to get their mail…
That being said, you can still become a FidoNet node and there are still a few nodes lying around.
I say we remember what it gave us in the past but move onto more modern stuff. I mean, modern things that keep close to the best aspects of such older things. About the only thing that I go for out of small mods to older protocols is protection from patent suits. That’s it.
But… what would I use it for? UUCP solved a problem: the absence of a switched network. Now we have a switched network. If I want to send you a file, you give me a hostname, and I connect to it. I don’t specify the hops in between because they aren’t relevant. And what if they change? What do I gain by specifying all the waypoints?
It’s a lovely idea, and I want to play with it just to see how it goes…
…but in these days of Mastodon, routing protocols and peer to peer networks, setting up the network topology by hand sounds really annoying, and it should be unnecessary. I dunno.
It would be a pain for mail, probably (bang path addressing!), but for news it shouldn’t be too bad, since most hosts will only have one or two peers. I couldn’t tell from their site if they are running a news feed, though.
I have really fond memories of having a Usenet feed via UUCP. It was well past the date when pretty much all Usenet was over NNTP, instead, but I wanted a local newsfeed on my PC, and a local ISP provided UUCP. It was honestly probably the most fulfilling form of social media I ever used.
Our local hack group (frostbyte.cc) has set up a tier 1 node on the dataforge network. We’ve been experimenting sending single files, and I’m curious to learn how to go from that to implementing newsgroups.
I fondly recall UUCP (and even more fondly, FidoNet), but man was it a pain to work with sometimes…sites disappearing, dropped messages, etc. There was a reason why people would often present multiple bang paths to get their mail…
That being said, you can still become a FidoNet node and there are still a few nodes lying around.
I say we remember what it gave us in the past but move onto more modern stuff. I mean, modern things that keep close to the best aspects of such older things. About the only thing that I go for out of small mods to older protocols is protection from patent suits. That’s it.
But… what would I use it for? UUCP solved a problem: the absence of a switched network. Now we have a switched network. If I want to send you a file, you give me a hostname, and I connect to it. I don’t specify the hops in between because they aren’t relevant. And what if they change? What do I gain by specifying all the waypoints?
It’s a lovely idea, and I want to play with it just to see how it goes…
…but in these days of Mastodon, routing protocols and peer to peer networks, setting up the network topology by hand sounds really annoying, and it should be unnecessary. I dunno.
It would be a pain for mail, probably (bang path addressing!), but for news it shouldn’t be too bad, since most hosts will only have one or two peers. I couldn’t tell from their site if they are running a news feed, though.
I still have my O’Reilly UUCP book in the Library. Next to the RPC one :)
I have really fond memories of having a Usenet feed via UUCP. It was well past the date when pretty much all Usenet was over NNTP, instead, but I wanted a local newsfeed on my PC, and a local ISP provided UUCP. It was honestly probably the most fulfilling form of social media I ever used.
Gah! If only the leaf node setup guide wasn’t empty! Any idea a good place to start? Tier 1 node?
Our local hack group (frostbyte.cc) has set up a tier 1 node on the dataforge network. We’ve been experimenting sending single files, and I’m curious to learn how to go from that to implementing newsgroups.
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It would probably be better to directly send them, or anyone affiliated with the project, a message, than to leave a comment on lobste.rs.
I thought it was you. mb.
[Comment removed by moderator alynpost: delete accidental duplicate comment.]