Margulies@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA ("Benson I. Margulies") (02/19/84)
It occurs to me that I was at least half serious. Note: I. The argument from Political Economics We are told that large corporate organizations want to use PC sized machines to store and process data. We are told that these organizations want to interchange information amongst widely seperated examples of these machines. We know that a large corporation will have very little tolerance for insecurity, unreliability, and general flakeyness. THEREFORE, we conclude that large organizations will have little use for UUCP as we know it today. We know that corporations have money to spend to soolve their problems. They bought the PC's. They buy federal express packets for big bucks. We know that where there is a demand for a service, and money to pay (generously) for it, that the service will usually spring up, unless trampled by state intervention. THEREFORE, we expect some large organization to offer a means by which an organization with many scattered machines can reliably and securely deliver information amongst them. Is it any surprise that MCI mail already is claiming to offer this service, even if it isn't all there yet? II. An argument about "randoms" Now, what about the intrepid explorers? Today, the intrepid explorers use UUCP and phone-net and friends. What choice have they? Given a nice, reliable, organized alternative, will they use it? If its cheap enough they sure will. Phone calls ain't free either. Why should I leave my PC sitting around dialing the phone like a little "daemon" if I could hand the delivery problem off to someone else? III. But still, we have to design ... Of course, a system like MCI, let alone a bunch of competing systems like MCI, will need to deal with name resolution and all those wonders. The domain scheme is a pretty reasonable approach. Let's hope that the commercial entities buy in before the chaos gets out of hand. But I think that the scenerio of 47million PC all tryping to figure out what phone number to call to reach each other is silly. They will call up MCI, or SPC, or the PostalService, and let it worry, for a fee. So to get really contentious: UUCP will die under its own weight, and be replaced by commercial carriers who have the resources to apply Internet/CCITT style solutions to naming and routing problems.
lauren@vortex.uucp (02/19/84)
The flaw in your argument is assuming that "corporate"-type entities demand that ALL of their communications be super reliable and secure. In fact, what many of them want is to be able to carry on much the same sorts of "non-critical" applications that we currently base on ARPANET, UUCP, etc. They want to chat among themselves, "talk" informally with researchers at other locations, tell jokes, and otherwise do the sorts of things the rest of us do now. For these sorts of applications, security and reliability are not critical, nor are such communications worth a lot of money. Force people to pay more than a very modest amount for such services, and they won't participate at all, or only participate for very "high-value" type communications. It's specifically the "lower-value", more informal sorts of communications that I consider to be of importance and that I'm trying to promote. Most businesses are not yet willing to entrust important communications to electronic mail (for a number of technical and legal reasons -- have you read MCI's disclaimer for MCI mail?) and I don't intend to try change their mind at this point. Nor am I offering a UUCP electronic funds transfer service... so don't panic! --Lauren--
fair@ucbvax.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (02/20/84)
This is a refutation to the notion that UUCP/USENET will collapse, contained in the conclusion of the referenced news article. In brief: 1. Assume that all UUCP/USENET sites must do computation that is useful to the owners of said site, in addition to the UUCP/USENET traffic that they carry. 2. Given 1., when traffic increases to a point where the `useful' work is not being done, excess traffic will be offloaded or cut off by the owners of the site. 3. Given 2., how & when does UUCP/USENET collapse? Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucb-arpa.ARPA