The Early History of Usenet - in 11 parts

Histories
1

Steven Bellovin’s work in progress (full TOC below) is past the half way point and an interesting read. From the (presently) most recent post, about B-News:

People would have preferred a real ARPANET connection but that was rarely feasible and never something that a student could set up: ARPANET connections were restricted to places that had research contracts with DARPA. The gateway at Berkeley was, eventually, bidirectional for both Usenet and email; this enabled Usenet-style communication between the networks.
…
It is, in fact, unclear if the gateway was technically permissible.

With the growth in the number of sites came more newsgroups and more articles. This made the limitations of the A-news user interface painfully apparent. Mary designed a new scheme; a high school student, Matt Glickman, implemented what became B-news. There were many improvements.

The most important change was the ability to read articles by newsgroup, and to read them out of order. By contrast, A-news presented articles in order of arrival, and only stored the high-water mark of continuous articles read.

B-news also introduced control messages. As noted, these were unauthenticated; mischief could and did result.

There was also control message support for mapping the network, which did not work as well as we expected.

Here’s the projected TOC:

Here is the table of contents, actual and projected, for this series.

  1. The Early History of Usenet: Prologue
  2. The Technological Setting
  3. Hardware and Economics
  4. File Format
  5. Implementation and User Experience
  6. Authentication and Norms
  7. The Public Announcement
  8. Usenet Growth and B-news
  9. The Great Renaming
  10. Retrospective Thoughts
  11. Errata…

(You might remember him as the writer of Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker)

2

Oh look some maps of the uucp/usenet connectivity:

Here is the backbone as of 1 April 1986:

                                                                      olduse.net
                                                                          |
                                                                  (wormhole to 2016)
                                                                          |
  cbosgd-----------------------------------clyde---------watmath--------utzoo
    |                                        |                            |
  ihnp4-------alberta------ubc-vision       burl                        linus
    | \                        |             |                            |
    | mgnetp                uw-beaver      ulysses--------------bellcore  |
    |                          |                                        \ |
    |                      tektronix-----------------------------------decvax
    |                          |                                        / |
  qantel---------------------\ | /---------oliveb-----glacier-----decwrl  |
    |                         \|/                                         |
    |  kddlab----------------hplabs-------sdcrdcf                         |
    |    |                     |             |                            |
    |    |                     |          sdcsvax                         |
    |    |  (see below)       hao            |                            |
    |    | /                   |          drillsys                        |
    |    |/                    |             |                            |
    |  mcvax-----------------seismo--------gatech----------akgua---------mcnc
    |                         /|\                                         |
 lll-lcc-----lll-crg---------/ | \---------cmcl2-----------------------philabs
                               |
                             munnari

This is the European backbone (mcvax feeds all of them):

       penet  enea   diku   unido           penet -> Finland
         |      \     |     /               enea -> Sweden
         |       \    |    /                diku -> Denmark
         |        \   |   /                 unido -> W. Germany
         |         \  |  /                  vmucnam -> France
vmucnam--+----------mcvax------cernvax      mcvax -> Netherlands
         |         /  |  \                  cernvax -> Switzerland
         |        /   |   \                 ukc -> Great Britain
         |       /    |    \                prlb2 -> Belgium
         |      /     |     \               i2unix -> Italy
       vmars  ukc    prlb2   i2unix         vmars -> Austria
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3

Ah, ubc-vision. A VAX 11/780 running BSD if I remember correctly. Might have been a 750. As a system administrator in the University of British Columbia’s Computer Science department I had an account on it in its later days. Belonged to our AI research group.

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