koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) (06/14/88)
It seems like the UUCP part of USENET is being saturated by all the binaries and talk.* postings that everyone is yelling about. It seems like a good solution to just encourage more sites to get on the Internet; it is nowhere near saturation, and provides services (ftp, for example) that would make some of the newsgroups completely unnecessary: rather than posting your favorite IBM PC binary to every site on the net, you just post an ad for it and leave it up in an anonymous FTP area on your site. I realize that laying down a connection to a neighbor site is very expensive, but it can be done, and in the long run might prove more cost-effective than placing lots of long-distance UUCP calls. Any comments? -Steven Grimm koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu
jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) (06/16/88)
In article <3772@saturn.ucsc.edu> koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) writes: > It seems >like a good solution to just encourage more sites to get on the >Internet; >I realize that laying down a connection to a neighbor site is very >expensive, but it can be done, and in the long run might prove more >cost-effective than placing lots of long-distance UUCP calls. Ah, if only it were that simple. As I understand it there are restrictions on who can connect to the internet. Sites that are connected have a clause in their contract that prohibits them from connecting someone else up and passing their traffic. This is all hearsay so if someone in the know would publish a summary of ways to get an internet connection I would be most pleased to read it.
henrik@blblbl.UUCP (Larry DeLuca) (06/17/88)
In article <3772@saturn.ucsc.edu>, koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) writes: > It seems like the UUCP part of USENET is being saturated by all the > binaries and talk.* postings that everyone is yelling about. It seems > like a good solution to just encourage more sites to get on the > Internet; it is nowhere near saturation, and provides services (ftp, First of all, getting on the Internet is a bit more involved than buying a 1200-baud modem and finding a neighbor. Permission to connect to the ARPAnet portion, for example, is given primarily to universities and institutions that sponsor DARPA research (like MIT) or who create networking products or support services for the net (like BB&N or FTP Software, Inc). I believe the Network Information Center at Stanford Research International (the NIC) are charged with giving people permission, etc. Second, it's much easier to get your employer to agree to a $149 modem when you have a spare phone line than it is to put in a T1 link (or even, God Forbid, a 9600-baud dedicated line - which will suck big pink hairy rocks). Third, *** THE INTERNET IS MORE OVERLOADED THAN THE USENET EVER THOUGHT OF BEING RIGHT NOW ***. About two years ago (I will presume you are a freshman or sophomore and so weren't around when it happened), one septmeber the Internet started to suck big pink hairy rocks. It got worse. You'd open up a TELNET connection, wait, wait, wait, and eventually it would time out while you tried to log in. BB&N went to work to find an answer (SRI on the west coast). The verdict: The Internet had "run out" of bandwidth. Fixing a number of bugs in existing TCP and gateway code allowed a breather, but it was realized then that it was only a matter of time before there weren't any more corners to cut, and things would have to go. Something along the lines of INFO-ARMAGGEDON sprang up on the appropriate wizards' mailing lists and SF-LOVERS and most of the other "fun" groups that are ARPAnet-based were quivering in their sockets hoping to see the light of day again. The ARPAnet is undergoing very serious re-structuring, and will probably go away as we know it sometime in the not-too-distant future, being replaced by a better distributed network that should handle the situation and traffic demands being made on it better. larry... PS: *** PLEASE *** don't flame me for missing a historical detail or two -- I have tried my best to provide a useful answer to the question, not the history of the ARPA World, Part I.