gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/05/89)
The limited resource on PC Pursuit was *always* outdial modems.
Network bandwidth was never the problem -- their network has to provide
enough bandwidth for the middle-of-the-day business users who pay
premium rates. But those premium users don't use the outdial modems
at all -- they are solely for PC Pursuit -- so there were never enough
of them, and still aren't.
Given this perspective, Usenet and Fidonet feeds are among the most
conscientious users of PC Pursuit. We call a local Telenet node,
quickly send it some commands to connect to the remote dialer, and get
off the line if the remote dialer is not available. If we get a
dialer, we dial the destination, and again get off if it doesn't answer
(freeing up the dialer -- the scarce resource). When we get through to
the destination, we don't dawdle around reading our mail, seeing who
else is on the system, or playing the latest computer game; we move our
data at maximum speed and get off the line. And rather than keeping
the remote dialer to try some other destination in that city, as many
BBS callers do, we hang up completely (freeing the dialer) and go back
to square one to try the next call.
Much of the above is due to the limitations of uucp "chat" scripts.
If we had had better chat scripts, we would have been more aggressive
PC Pursuit users. But nevertheless, it is true.
PC Pursuit was not badly crowded if you are a computer. You might have
to redial once an hour for five or ten hours to get a dialer, but
at 3 or 4 or 5AM you would get one. But for human, interactive use,
it was pretty bad (not only the dialer problems; using Telenet to
talk full duplex is like eating a whole jar of peanut butter). That's
why most people moved to using it for computer-to-computer communication.
Recall for a moment that Telenet was built by the same people who built
the Arpanet (BBN). The Arpanet leased lines are/were used 24 hours/day
because at night, bulk data moves over it (SMTP mail, ftp file
transfers, NNTP). During the day, much of the traffic is interactive.
On Telenet, they had all interactive traffic and no bulk data, because
they never provided a way for one computer to call another through it
(unless you bought a leased line connection to Telenet and ran X.25
over it). PC Pursuit was a way to get some late night bulk data
transfer into Telenet, and it worked. Why they want to price it to
kill that traffic, I don't know.
It's been a mainstay of both the Usenet and the Fidonet over the last
two years. I'll be sorry to see it go (but I canceled my PC Pursuit
account today, effective 1 Feb 88 -- call +1 800 835 32638 to do so).
--
John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com
Love your country but never trust its government.
-- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania