On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Jonathan Hutchins [email protected] wrote:
Usenet still runs a majority of backbone connections in the U.S. - but I know of no dial-up UUCP connections that are still in use.
I'm not immune to making mistakes, but this claim of your seems contrary to my understanding of the term, Usenet. You see, Usenet arose as a kind of poor man's Internet, back in the days when the Internet was still to expensive for a lot of universities, and far too expensive for most individuals. UUCP offered a ways of giving email and discussion forum access to a lot of organizations that couldn't afford to connect to the expensive research network that DARPA was starting to use to support its research. A bunch of academic sites started using UUCP to connect to each other, and they called it Usenet. Each site on Usenet simply had to connect to a small number (possibly only one) other Usenet site, and then files could be transferred, hop by hop, to any other Usenet site. There were maps of Usenet connections, and programs that would facilitate building "bang paths", which were used to route files along Usenet's UUCP connections. The whole point of Usenet was that it was a cheap alternative to the Internet.
I guess what I'm pointing out to the group as a whole is that the word "Usenet" has a meaning that is related to "Usenet News" but is not at all the same as "Usenet News" I think most people who use the word "Usenet" these days are using it incorrectly, and I'm guessing that you are, also. It would be correct to say, "Usenet News still runs" on a lot of servers on the Internet in the US. A lot can still be said about "Usenet News". But Usenet, itself, was inherently UUCP/dialup based. The whole point of Usenet was to give people a communication alternative to the Internet, back when it was still far to expensive for most of us. The services that Usenet used to provide have migrated over to the Internet, and I think this confuses people. Also, since most people have no experience with Usenet, itself, but they do have experience with Usenet News, they don't see the harm in shortening "Usenet News" to "Usenet". But "Usenet" does have a related but distinct meaning.
I don't mean to pick on you, Jonathan, or on Jeffrey. Almost everyone who uses the word "Usenet" uses it wrong, these days. It makes it hard to even talk about the old Usenet days, because most people think, incorrectly, that they already know what the word means.
Adrian