Re: lamers on IRC

[Thomas Lord]

> >    My initial encounter with net news did not involve ISPs or
> >    the IP protocol. It was company X's computers running a cron
> >    script to dial up and log in to computers at company Y.
> >    (Some others at the same time were already peering over
> >    the Arpanet.)

> So how did that happen if not the Internet, telephone line
> and UUCP?

UUCP was used over landlines, with fast (for the day)
modems.   For connecting systems that are physically close
(like, same machine room), the modem and telephone wires
could be omitted to use just rs232 lines directly.

That's why I say, today, to build a P2P social network it
would be sensible to start with something like (perhaps
exactly like) rsync(1) and handle live chat and streaming
separately.

Not limited to social networks, either.  Wouldn't it be interesting
if, say, wikipedia were (search features notwithstanding) just
a static set of files you'd cache widely using rsync, submitting
patches to pages using some kind of low-tech distributed, decentralized
revision control system?   So much resiliance.  So much non-reliance
on any specific network technology.  Such simplicity.  ;-)

-t



On 2022-05-28 09:54, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> Thomas Lord wrote:
>
> > Although individual posts flow in both directions between
> > peers, in practice, some nodes emerged, the main function of
> > which was to form a kind of high bandwidth backbone carrying
> > all the net-work wide popular groups, and offering peering
> > to many peripheral nodes.
> >
> > To continue the example: at the little start-up I worked at,
> > they didn't try to carry all the groups available at the
> > time. They carried some obvious groups (such as comp.lang.c,
> > about the C programming language) and, beyond those core
> > groups, they would add anything someone asked for and that
> > the big "upstream" peer had.
> >
> > The big upstream peer got most of its very large set of
> > groups to choose from by peering with other big hosts.
> > They also carried back posts from "edge nodes" to the rest
> > of the world.
> >
> > The p2p software - that today might easily be replaced with
> > something close to rsync(1) - saw peers as symmetric.
> > The IRL social network operating netnews recognized the
> > big-iron/big-pipes/serves-many "upstream" as different from
> > the local hosts/low activity/selected groups "downstream".
> > Maybe a bit like how the logical functions of Internet
> > routers are symmetrical, but an upstream/downstream topology
> > emerges on the basis of the physical network and who is
> > connected where.
>
> Got it,
>
> inner node = server, upstream
>
> edge node = host (client), downstream
>
> but in theory the server could act as a host and the host as
> a server?
>
> > > I've heard the so called binary groups (which contained
> > > multimedia) were part of the reason of the fall in popular
> > > use since people were sharing files - so not the least XXX
> > > rated movies - to the extent it ate up most of the
> > > bandwidth while there still wasn't a monetary incentive to
> > > keep providing the service, from the ISP's POV ...
> >
> > My initial encounter with net news did not involve ISPs or
> > the IP protocol. It was company X's computers running a cron
> > script to dial up and log in to computers at company Y.
> > (Some others at the same time were already peering over
> > the Arpanet.)
>
> So how did that happen if not the Internet, telephone line
> and UUCP?