dyer (02/08/83)
I like to think of the ARPAnet as the network WITH: reliable mail system easy file transfer remote login
mark (02/09/83)
You are both wrong! The ARPANET has news, in fact several ARPANET sites are on USENET, and some news is transferred over ARPANET links. (However, a lot of the ARPANET sites seem to think that mailing lists are somehow better than the concept of news, and I have given up on trying to convince them otherwise.) Anyone who has been on the ARPANET in the last month knows that ARPANET mail is often anything but reliable. Not that UUCP mail is any better, but mail in general likes to fall on the floor, even on the ARPANET. File transfer on the ARPANET is not exactly what I'd call convenient either - you have to sit there and watch the files get transferred (yawn); and you have to have a valid remote login and password on many sites, even to send your friend a file! (Make that ESPECIALLY to send your friend a file - the anonymous login hack only works for retrieving public files.) What the ARPANET does give you is high bandwidth connections, reasonable software (most of the time), and reasonable remote login at high baud rates. Also, somebody else is paying the phone bills. But it's a very expensive network to join, and you have to get the Dept of Defense to approve you, so we average joes (even at Bell Labs) can't get on. This is not to defend UUCP, of course.
trt (02/11/83)
References: utah-cs.1356 Uucp is not the place to add 'a mail protocol'. Nor should uucp have 'a news protocol', a 'uusend protocol', and so on. The *mail* program should manage an end-to-end protocol. Uux's job is to deliver a file to a process, not to guarantee tha that the process executes correctly. I heard Eric Allman's talk on sendmail at UNICOM, and concluded that his mailer still depends on: The existence of an 'rmail' program at each site. Sufficient disk space to hold various spooling files. No machine crashes during the uux->rmail->uux handoff. Otherwise, mail gets dropped on the floor. Uucp should be enhanced to do many things: routing, faster transfers, fewer errors. But errors do happen, and any program which uses uucp must account for them or mail, news, or whatever will 'fall through the cracks.' Tom Truscott