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Received: from delta.eecs.nwu.edu by MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU id aa05081;
8 Oct 95 12:14 EDT
Received: by delta.eecs.nwu.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id PAA08360 for telecomlist-outbound; Thu, 5 Oct 1995 15:23:09 -0500
Received: by delta.eecs.nwu.edu (8.6.12/8.6.12) id PAA08353; Thu, 5 Oct 1995 15:23:06 -0500
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 15:23:06 -0500
From: TELECOM Digest (Patrick Townson) <telecom@delta.eecs.nwu.edu>
Message-Id: <199510052023.PAA08353@delta.eecs.nwu.edu>
To: telecom@delta.eecs.nwu.edu
Subject: History of the Early Days of Usenet
Ronda Hauben has been working on her history of the early days of
Usenet for some time now, and she has 'bounced off' ideas via our
Digest since she began the project. She has once again asked if
those of you who have been around for awhile would like to review
her work in progress and make suggestions, corrections, etc. I am
sending this out as a special mailing to the TELECOM Digest list
with my request that you assist Ronda if you can do so. Please get
back to her this week if possible, by October 10 at latest.
PAT
From: ronda@panix.com (Ronda Hauben)
Subject: On the Early Days of Usenet
Date: 4 Oct 1995 22:44:18 -0400
Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC
Following is a second draft of an article I am working on about the
early days of Usenet for the updated Netizens book. I would
appreciate any comments or suggestions as I am trying to finish a
revised draft by Oct. 9. Thanks to those who commented on an earlier
draft, as the comments were very helpful and I have tried to
incorporate the suggestions into this draft.
Ronda
The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net
An Anthology on the History and Impact of the Net
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/project_book.html
ON THE EARLY DAYS OF USENET:
THE ROOTS OF THE COOPERATIVE ONLINE CULTURE
(Part 1 of 3)
by Ronda Hauben
rh120@columbia.edu
"Without a historical perspective, it's quite easy to get
the wrong impression of how all this came to pass. It is the
result of the work of a large number of individuals, some of
whom have been at it for the last 20 years."
Lauren Weinstein, 1990
"Even if we have shifted away from discussing human networks,
we are getting a first hand EXPERIENCE of what they are
through this mailing list. No amount of `a priori'
theorizing of their nature,' has as much explanatory power
as personal experience. By observing what happens when
connectivity is provided to a large mass of people in which
they can FREELY voice their ideas, doubts, and opinions, a
lot of insight is obtained into very important issues of
mass intercommunication."
Human-Nets Mailing List, 03 June
1981, Jorge Phillips, Subject:
administrivia
Usenet was born in 1979. It has grown from a design conceived of
by two graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, at Duke
University in North Carolina, to a logical network linking millions of
people and computers to over 9,500 different newsgroups and millions
of bytes of articles available at any given time at hundreds of
thousands of sites around the world. Yet little is generally known
about how Usenet began and how it developed.
Computer Chess - The Mini Slays the Mainframe
Tom Truscott had a dream. As a kid he had read the book Danny Dunn
and the Homework Machine. He decided that it would be neat to have a
homework machine. Some things caught his imagination and this
particular goal not only set him on a course that would affect his
future, but it also would have an unexpected impact on the rest of the
world. By the summer of 1970, before his senior year in high school,
Truscott had enrolled in a summer computer program that gave him his
first chance to use a computer and to learn to program in BASIC. "My
first large program played checkers," he remembers of that summer.(1)
"It didn't play all that well," he admits, but it introduced him to
some of the power of computers. As a college freshman at Duke
University the next year Truscott met another student in his chemistry
lab who was an excellent chess player. Truscott describes how he told
his chemistry lab partner Bruce Wright that "we could write a computer
chess program that would beat Bobby Fisher." Wright "didn't think so,
but we started writing the program anyway," Truscott continues. "I was
interested because of the computing challenge and no doubt the fame we
would garner by defeating Fisher, and I guess Bruce was interested
because he wanted to learn computing." Truscott describes how the two
undergraduates spent "a LOT of time" writing their chess program and
in the process they learned a lot about how not to write programs.
Truscott was interested in how game programs were like robots
since they functioned as autonomous creatures. "At tournaments," he
points out, "the program tells me what moves to make for it, asks me
how much time it has left on the clock," etc. And writing a software
robot, Truscott observes, "is a lot easier than building a real one."
Once Truscott and Wright had set their sights on creating a
championship chess program, Truscott set out to research what work had
been done on the problem. He found that Claude Shannon had written "a
very early paper on how to construct a chess playing machine."(2) "It
was remarkably farsighted given the state of computing then," Truscott
remembers. The next oldest paper he found was from 1958 by someone who
implemented a program similar to Shannon's proposal. "It played terribly,"
he recalls.(3)
Also, by Spring of 1974, Truscott had joined the Association of
Computing Machinery (ACM) to receive notification of the computer
chess tournaments. Reading through the journal "Communications of the
ACM" in 1974, he came across an article about a new operating system
created by research programmers at Bell Labs.(4) In the article, he
noticed that a program created by a Bell Labs team ran in the
background sopping up idle CPU time and solving simple chess endgames
(for example King and Rook vs. King). Truscott explains how there was
no chance he and Wright could do something like that on the mainframe
computer they were using, since it cost 20 cents per second. But he
notes that their mainframe was about the fastest there was and could
compute rings around the DEC PDP-11 that the Unix operating system ran
on.
He and Wright created their program for the IBM System 370
Model 160 MVT/TSO mainframe computer system at Duke. It had three
megabytes of main memory, which Truscott notes was later upgraded
to "4 megabytes for a mere $100,000." That was, according to
Truscott, "Pretty much the top of the line at the time. We did
our development in batch mode," he remembers, "The source code
was on punched cards and the compiled code was stored on disk."
And in tournaments, he and Wright used the IBM timesharing mode
TSO.
The first computer chess tournament Truscott and Wright
competed in was the North American Chess Championships held at
the ACM Annual Conference in San Diego, California in November
1974. By then, Truscott was in his senior year at Duke. He and
Wright named their chess program Duchess.
Following is Truscott's description of his first tournament
and how he met one of the most respected programmers in the Unix
community during that tournament. Truscott writes:
"There were twelve teams competing in the tournament.
We were on a stage in a large room with seating for
spectators. Each team had a computer terminal (something
like a dot-matrix printer with a keyboard in front and an
acoustic modem on the back). And a telephone. Boy were those
phone calls expensive. But the ACM was picking up the tab,
and Duke was giving us the computer time.
At the 1974 tournament, we knocked off MIT's TECH-II in
the first round. They had come in second the previous year,
and we were a newcomer, so that was something of an upset.
In the second round we got clobbered by the perennial champ,
CHESS 4.0 from Northwestern University.
In the third round we played Bell Labs' Belle. It was
called T. Belle at that point. I had met the author earlier,
before the second round, when he showed me how good
his program was at solving mating problems. I wasn't that
interested in chess, but humored him while he pulled a chess
position out of a library and had the program find a mate in
5 (or some such). I guess if I actually played chess I would
have been impressed.
So when the third round began, Bruce Wright and I were
on one side of a table, and Ken Thompson and someone else
from Bell Labs (who years later I realized was Brian
Kernighan), were on the other. I noticed that when Ken
Thompson logged on, the Bell Labs computer printed:
Chess tonight, please don't compute.
I mentioned that that was really neat to be able to get the
comp center to put out a notice like that. He said something
non-commital in response. So the game began. A few hours and
a few thousand dollars later we really had Belle on the
ropes. All it had left was a lone king and we were about to
queen a pawn! But then our program ABENDed (core dumped) in
a way that caused the phone line to drop. We dialed back in
and set things up, same thing. Every so often it would
actually make a move. But making the phone call was slow (we
had to ask for an outside line from the hotel operator) and
painful (rotary dial you know) and eventually our program
lost on time."
After the tournament was over, Truscott and Wright
examined what had happened and they observed that the problem
was not with their program, but rather with a bug in the
TSO operating system on their mainframe. "Thus was our mighty
mainframe slain by a minicomputer," he admitted, as they had lost
the competition because the operating system of their mainframe
computer had proven inferior to the operating system of the mini
computer used by the Bell Labs Team. "But I didn't realize it was
UNIX," Truscott recalls, noting that the victory went to the Bell
Labs team and their mini computer because of the power of their
Unix operating system.
Truscott and Wright competed in every ACM Computer Chess
Competition [CCC] from 1974 to 1980. The next time he met Ken
Thompson was at the 1976 Unix Users Group meeting at Harvard.
"That was great fun," he remembers. There were about 80
attendees. "Somewhere along the way I made the connection between
Belle and Thompson and UNIX." By this time Truscott was a
graduate student at Duke where he and others had just installed
Unix Version 6 on the CS Department computer.
"I was also at the 1978 UNIX Users Group meeting at Columbia
University, and both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were there,"
Truscott continues, "Thompson also competed in the 1978 ACM CCC.
He had some special chess hardware but it was no match for the
much-improved mainframe programs."
"Because of our mutual interests," Truscott recalls,
"Thompson would even call up our computer at Duke from time to
time, and `write' me. That was pretty intense, my trying to pick
perfect sentences to send along to the genius at the other end. I
think it was during one of those `write' sessions in early 1979,
that he asked if I would be interested in a summer job."
Truscott accepted Thompson's offer and spent the summer of
1979 at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the birthplace of
Unix. That Summer, a distribution of the Unix Operating System,
Unix Version 7 was made available to sites with licenses from
AT&T to use Unix. Included in the Unix V7 distribution were a
number of Unix tools such as "sed" "awk" "uucp" and the Bourne
Shell. These tools were very helpful and would prove invaluable
in the creation of Usenet.
Truscott found that Bell Labs provided an exciting and
supportative environment. Following is his account of this
important summer in 1979 that he spent playing volleyball, eating
pizza and working on a daily basis with many of the pioneers of
the Unix community. He writes:
"Woke up at 11 am. Got to Bell Labs at noon so I could play
volleyball out on the front lawn with Mike Lesk and Steve
Bourne and other folks. After a few weeks, the security
folks told us they couldn't have a regulated monopoly
running around loose like that. Lunch at 1pm in the Bell
Labs restaurant. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and Greg
Chesson were regulars. They had lunch at 1pm because
sometimes they didn't get to work until then. Sometimes
Dennis Ritchie would entertain us with some horror story
about a non-UNIX system he dealt with recently...."
"At 2pm the day began, which involved doing pretty much
whatever we wanted. Ritchie was working on `streams'. I
think Ken Thompson was working on typesetting software but
mostly working on a chess machine....Often at 7pm a group
would go out for dinner (they liked pizza). Occasionally
someone would host dinner at their home. Afterwards I would
go back to the Labs and work until midnight. And the next
day I would get up `at the crack of noon' as Thompson put
it."
As the summer ended, Truscott left Bell Labs and returned to
Duke.
Using Unix to Create an Online Commmunity
Truscott, describing his return to Duke, writes, "Of course when
the summer was over and I was back at Duke, one of the first things I
did was arrange a uucp connection to research. They called us nightly,
which was great." Truscott and Dennis Ritchie set up a uucp connection
between "duke" a CS Department computer site at Duke in Durham, North
Carolina, and "research" a computer site at Bell Labs in Murray Hill,
New Jersey.
The uucp program that was part of the V7 distribution of Unix
made it possible to send email and files to other Unix sites using
telephone lines as long as the sending computer had an autodialing
modem and the receiving computer had an auto answering modem.
But these links did not make up for the fact that by Fall 1979,
Truscott was back at Duke and no longer in the exciting environment of
the birthplace of Unix. After having worked at Bell Labs for Ken
Thompson, where, as in Truscott's words, "I was in UNIX heaven the
whole time, returning to Duke in the fall meant the end of that."
Also, that summer he had attended the Unix User's Group meeting in
Toronto, Canada. Once back at Duke the primary connection with the
Unix community was through the Usenix newsletter ";Login:". This
newsletter, however, hadn't appeared in a while. That Fall, another
Duke graduate student, Jim Ellis installed the latest Unix (V7)
edition on a Duke Computer Science computer. It broke many old
programs, including a public domain `items' program that had provided
a local bulletin board. Truscott recalls how the program allowed items
to be entered into one of several categories. "It had a number of
problems," he explains, "including a 512 byte limit per item, so we
were thinking about writing a completely new program. Then we could
contribute it to the next user group tape and hopefully achieve some
minor level of fame."
Truscott attributes the creation of Usenet to the confluence of
these events in Fall 1979. He describes a long rambling conversation
he and Ellis had one night considering these circumstances. The idea
for Usenet developed during their discussion.
Soon afterwards, Truscott and Ellis met with two other local
Unix enthusiasts, Dennis Rockwell, who was a graduate student and
worked in the Physiology Department at Duke, and Steve Bellovin, who
was a graduate student at the neighboring University of North Carolina
(UNC) at Chapel Hill. They decided on the transfer format, i.e., on
what an article would look like to make it possible to ship files via
computers using uucp, and they agreed on the basic functionality of
the software they would need to create an online network.
Bellovin wrote a shell script using Unix to test the design
concept. Describing the early work to create Usenet, Bellovin writes:
"The release of the uucp program with V7 UNIX provided the
initial impetus. So did the Bourne shell. So the very first
version of net news was a 3-page shell script. It supported
multiple newsgroups, cross-postings, and subscription lists
implemented as environmental variables. As best as I can
tell, this script has not survived."(5)
Bellovin emphasizes how the ease of testing software design
facilitated by Unix made it possible to create Usenet. "It's worth
noting now that given the speed (or lack thereof) of the machines we
had we utterly relied on the ease of writing shell scripts to
experiment with protocol variants. Compilation would have taken much
too long."
Commenting about the early plan for Usenet, Bellovin notes:
"We estimated a maximum size of 100 sites, and 1-2
articles a day, net-wide...you couldn't read things out of
order. The goal there (and in many other spots) was to have
software free of databases. Instead, we chose to let the
file system do the work."
Bellovin recalls why a news program to replace the one they had
used with Unix V6 was needed. "Another motivation," he writes, "was
some sort of local news system. On V6, Duke and UNC had a local news
system that came from somewhere. But articles were limited to 512
bytes, and we didn't carry it forward to V7. A prime requirement was
that there be an efficient way to test for the presence of news (hence
the checknews program)."
The Duke and University of North Carolina graduate students hoped
to contribute their news program to the Usenet community to be used
with Unix V7. According to Truscott, the shell script was slow, but
worked. They also decided on terminology such as 'newsgroups' to
describe the subject areas they would have as part of their network.
"That was probably due to the newsletter analogy," he explains since
"this was long before the PC and bulletin boards."(6)
Stephen Daniel, another Duke graduate student soon became
involved and made a substantial contribution to the work. Truscott
writes that Daniel "created the dotted newsgroup structure that we
know today," for the newsnaming scheme (i.e. NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx)
Also, Steve Daniel wrote one of the earliest versions of the netnews
software in the C programming language. This came to be known as
"A-News".
Truscott and Wright continued to participate in the Chess
Tournaments and in 1980 they competed in the 3rd world Computer Chess
Championship held in Linz, Austria. Thompson and Joe Condon, who was a
technician at Bell Labs, were also in the competition. Truscott notes
that Thompson and Condon "had completed their hardware chess machine
and snagged first place. Duchess came in third. And Claude Shannon
was in attendance, and even handed out the trophies at the awards
ceremony. Afterwards we all went over to a TV studio to watch a West
German TV special on computer chess, and the championship. Claude
Shannon and his wife were very engaging people. Someone took a photo
of all of us, I have a copy buried somewhere."
When Usenet was created, the newsgroup NET.chess was created as
one of the early newsgroups. By developing Usenet, the Unix community
became the force behind the creation of an online community that would
welcome participants into the cooperative culture that the Unix
pioneers had found important in helping them to create Unix. Graduate
students at Duke and the University of North Carolina were able to use
Unix to create an online community to provide needed technical and
social support. They later named this users network Usenet. The
earliest map for Usenet was made up of the first two computers that
were sites for Usenet:
duke - unc
The sites were:
1) duke Duke University
2) unc University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Another computer at Duke joined the Network. The computer was
named phs. It was in the Physiology Department at Duke Medical School.
The map of Usenet then became:
duke - unc
\ /
phs
The third site was:
3) phs Physiology Department of the Duke Medical School
Soon connections were set up with computers at Bell Labs. The
computer site "research" and then "vax135" at the Labs were added to
Usenet. In the summer of 1980, Mark Horton, a graduate student at the
University of California at Berkeley, brought the computer site
"ucbvax" onto Usenet.(7)
A map of Usenet during the Summer 1980 shows the sites then
connected:
reed phs
\ / \
uok --- duke --unc
/ \
research vax135
|
ucbvax
The additional sites were:
4) reed Reed College
5) uok University of Oklahoma
6) research Bell Labs Murray Hill
7) vax135 Bell Labs Murray Hill
8) ucbvax University of California at Berkeley
Bell Telephone Labs (Murray Hill) operating the computer named
"research" was the first site to pick up the phone bills for calls
between "ucbvax" at the University of California at Berkeley and
"duke" at Duke University via "research." Horton writes: "The first
cross country link was from duke to research, then from research to
ucbvax, all on research's nickel."(8)
Horton recalls how amazed he was to get email messages from
Usenet pioneers at Duke and the University of North Carolina just a
few hours after he had sent them messages, thanks to the connectivity
provided by the Bell Labs computer. "I remember," he writes, "while at
Berkeley, exchanging email with the original `A-News' developers and
being amazed that I could get a reply back a few hours later, even
though `research' was polling both `duke' and `ucbvax' to pick up
waiting mail."
The first newsgroups on Usenet, according to Truscott, were known
as NET.xxxx and dept.xxxx. After Horton joined Usenet, he began
feeding mailing lists from the ARPANET into Usenet. Mailing lists from
the ARPANET fed into Usenet were identified as FA.xxxx newsgroups.
Truscott notes that, "Only when ucbvax joined the net, did `fa'
appear." Truscott explains that he didn't know about the ARPANET
mailing lists until Horton joined Usenet.
At first the Usenet community could only read these ARPANET
mailing lists, but couldn't contribute to them. "It was a one-way
gateway - ARPANET into Usenet only, done with recnews, as I recall,"
writes Horton.(9) But at least it was possible for the Usenet
community to follow the interesting discussions carried on via the
ARPANET mailing lists during this early period of Usenet.
Bellovin explains why feeding the ARPANET mailing lists into
Usenet was so important for the development both of Usenet and of the
ARPANET. "Actually in my opinion," Bellovin writes, "one of the key
elements in the early growth of Usenet was when Mark Horton started
feeding the SF lovers and human-nets mailing lists into newsgroups.
Those provided a critical mass of traffic and served as a lure to
attract new sites." He describes how "The ARPANET was supposed to be a
self-contained entity, and only approved sites were allowed to
connect." Therefore, the connection between Usenet and the ARPANET
broke important new ground. Bellovin writes, "Mail to and from Usenet
only sites, was an interesting test case that *wasn't* stamped out,
though I think it skated on some very thin ice for a while."
The "ucbvax" site at the University of California at Berkeley
provided a crucial gateway between Usenet and the ARPANET. The
University of California at Berkeley could provide the gateway because
it was also a site on the ARPANET. The CS Department vax computer
(csvax) became the site "ucbvax" on the UUCP network. An internal
network Berknet was set up to connect "ucbvax" on the UUCP network to
"Berkeley" on the ARPANET. Horton explains that Professor Michael
Stonebraker and Professor Domenico Ferrari, who were doing research to
develop the Ingres data base, had a pair of machines (ing70) and
(ingvax) which were sites on the ARPANET. They allowed Horton to use
these machines for Usenet. Ing70 was the site known as "Berkeley" on
the ARPANET. Horton and two other graduate students, Eric Allman and
Eric Schmidt, set up the gateway between Usenet and the ARPANET and
made it work. Schmidt created the local net, Berknet, to connect the
ARPANET and the UUCPnet. The ARPANET and UUCP computers were tied
together by Schmidt's Berknet. The path, Horton explains, went:
"Any ARPA machine to Berkeley via ARPANET mail
Ing70 (aka Berkeley) to csvax via Berknet
ucbvax (aka csvax) to any UUCP machine via UUCP."(10)
Human-Nets and WorldNet
The Human-Nets mailing list [known on Usenet as the newsgroup
FA.Human-nets] provided a mass of interesting posts to attract Usenet
readership at a crucial period in Usenet's development. The mailing
list Human-Nets, Truscott remembers, was a mailing list from the
ARPANET for discussing the implications of world-wide ubiquitous
networking. "This network of the future," he recalls, was referred to
as WorldNet." It was a very interesting mailing list and possible only
due to the ability of the network itself to permit those interested in
this obscure topic to communicate."(11)
A directory of the ARPANET mailing lists maintained at MIT during
this period lists each of the mailing lists. Describing Human-Nets, it
notes that this mailing list "has discussed many topics, all of them
related in some way to the theme of a world- wide computer and
communications network usually called WorldNet. The topics have
ranged very widely from something like tutorials, to state of the art
discussions, to rampant speculations about technology and its
impact."(12)
An article on Usenet about Human-Nets explained that "one reader
expressed a wish for a `World Net' to tie all sorts of computers
worldwide together."(13)
Another article described how WorldNet "was a nice idea to dream
about", but the writer was pessimistic that it could ever be
implemented, at least within the next 10 years. He acknowledged,
however, "Still, it's a fun idea to think about," and advised, "Maybe
it should be tried on a smaller scale first (a distributed network of
students with PCs at a university, perhaps a small city, or large
community.) Who knows," the poster observed, "with a PC in almost
every home in a few years, maybe it'll be possible and desirable."(14)
One of the moderators of Human-Nets maintained how important it
was to participate in such online discussion for those interested in
developing ubiquitous world wide networking. Responding to a
departing moderator's complaint that the discussion on the list had
diverged to a variety of topics, the new moderator disagreed. He
retorted:
"Even if we have shifted away from discussing human networks,
we are getting a first hand EXPERIENCE of what they are
through this mailing list. No amount of `a priori'
theorizing of their nature,' has as much explanatory power
as personal experience. By observing what happens when
connectivity is provided to a large mass of people in which
they can FREELY voice their ideas, doubts, and opinions, a
lot of insight is obtained into very important issues of
mass intercommunication."
"The fact," he continued, "that...dissimilar...topics have been
discussed in our own instance of a human network says a lot about its
nature and the interests and nature of its members and should not be
considered as detracting from the quality of the discussion."
"A human network," he concluded, "is a springboard for human
interaction and thus for human action. Let's view it as such and keep
repression and censorship at a minimum."(15)
(Part 2 of 3)
UUCPnet and the "Iron Curtain" of the ARPANET
In contrast to the vision of ubiquitous human networking via
computers discussed on the Human-Nets mailing list, the Usenet
community faced a difficult battle when trying to communicate with
those on the ARPANET. Posts on Usenet during the 1981 period reflect
the constant efforts and frustration experienced by those on Usenet
who wanted to contribute to the ARPANET mailing lists.
Another popular ARPANET mailing list during this early period of
Usenet was the Unix-wizards mailing list. It provided for discussion,
the sharing of experiences, of problems, and of software, and for the
debate over various issues that faced the Unix community. The mailing
list was gatewayed from the ARPANET to Usenet and was available on
Usenet as the newsgroup FA.unix- wizards.
Recognizing the early difficulty that those on Usenet had in
posting to the ARPANET mailing lists, one user asked:
"You mean saying -n fa.unix.wizards doesn't get back to the
arpanet? Does it just get to USENET? Or does it go
anywhere?"(16)
Another post reported the frustration experienced by those on
Usenet who were trying to send messages to mailing lists carried on
the ARPANET. The person wrote:
"With regard to the ARPA/UUCP gateway problem, it appears
that arpanet sites refuse to process mail from UUCP
machines, while UUCP machines typically don't bother
checking who stuff comes from before passing it on. In most
cases this costs real money in terms of phone rates, use of
spool space, etc...."(17)
He proposed that UUCP sites retaliate so that transporting
messages to Usenet from the ARPANET would be equally difficult:
"We could have messages of the type:
`Gateway to UUCPnet Closed...Service Unavailable'"
He asked others on Usenet for "any ideas what kind of
response would result if this was implemented?"
Responding to this proposal, another Usenet user offered his
objection:
"I'd rather see messages of this form going back to ARPA:
`Gateway to UUCPnet open...No Iron Curtain here'"
"Or some such self-righteous garbage. Seriously, the
interchange of information is too useful to get embroiled in
hurt feelings. I get mad when Arpa blindly refuses stuff but
would rather try to shame them (good luck!) than play the
same game."(18)
There were those on the ARPANET who sympathized with the problems
experienced by the Usenet community in trying to contribute to the
ARPANET mailing lists. Commenting on the frustration, a user at a U.S.
government site that was both on the ARPANET and on Usenet wrote: "I
am also concerned about USENET participants. We really need to be able
to interact with them in a better way, yet UUCP gateways to the
ArpaNet are VERBOTEN".(19)
Often Usenet users would try to send messages to the ARPANET
gateway only to get back notification that their message had bounced.
Common messages notifying Usenet users that their efforts to send
messages to the ARPANET mailing lists had failed included:
"Sorry not an ARPANET gateway: Unable to deliver Mail"
"unix-wizards@sri-unix... Mail has been disallowed between
the Arpanet and Uucp net"
"unix-wizards@sri-unix... Service unavailable"
Other messages on Usenet during this period describe similar
problems. For example, one user describes how he sent out 5 email
messages to the mailing list FA.unix-wizards and each came back to him
undelivered. He then tried to send the messages to the mailing list
again, or in frustration gave up and posted them on Usenet in the
newsgroup "net.general" so others could see the problems he was
having. He reported:
"It doesn't always work, folks! Last week I submitted 5
letters to ucbvax!unix-wizards; and got each one of them
back the very next day, saying `service unavailable.'
Depending on the message I either shipped it back right
away, or just put it in net.general in disgust."(20)
The ARPAnet <=> UUCPnet gateway
The gateway set up to make it possible for uucp users of Usenet
to contribute to the ARPANET mailing list Unix-wizards via uucp to
"ucbvax", from "ucbvax" along Berknet to "Berkeley", the UCB site on
the ARPANET, and from that site along the ARPANET via email to
"sri-unix", a site on the ARPANET that would distribute the mailing
list back to "Berkeley" or send it out on the ARPANET. The site
`sri-unix' was a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, which
was one of the earliest sites on the ARPANET. Describing how this
gateway worked, a user from the University of California at Berkeley
wrote:
"Ucbvax is currently set up such that if you, as a UUCPnet
(Usenet) user, send mail to `...ucbvax!unix-wizards', the
message will be *automatically* forwarded to unix-
wizards@sri-unix (via our internal network and then via the
ARPAnet)."(21)
He describes how `sri-unix' transported the message back to
other sites:
"The message is then redistributed by sri-unix to all sites
on their `master' list, which include `csvax.post-unix-
wizards@Berkeley'."
In this way, the message was sent out on Usenet. "When we at
Berkeley," he explained, "receive something addressed to this rather
baroque-looking recipient, it is handed over to our network news
program. From there, the message is redistributed via UUCPnet to the
rest of the world."
"ARPAnet access," he noted, "is not available (at least through
Berkeley) for `private communications', which would include someone on
the UUCPnet attempting to respond to an INDIVIDUAL who submitted
something via the ARPAnet, or vice versa."
A user at the Ballistics Research Labs (BRL) noted the burden the
gateway imposed on both the University of California at Berkeley and
SRI and offered to help if necessary. He wrote:
BRL has a strong commitment to UNIX, and we encourage
discussions about UNIX. If SRI gets overwhelmed by the
burden of distributing the list, or if we `clone' several
lists, we will be glad to take the task of mailing the
stuff.'(22)
By September 1981, a post indicated that the ucb<=>sri-unix
gateway for the Unix-wizards mailing list was being changed. "This is
the last message you'll be receiving on Unix-wizards through
SRI-UNIX," the writer reported. "Now the list will be mailed out of
SRI-WARF(host 1/73);" he noted(23).
Posts could still be sent to `sri-unix', but they would then be
forwarded for transporting to `sri.warf'.
Numerous other users commented on the precariousness of this
UUCPnet - ARPANET gateway used by the Usenet (uucp) community during
this period. For example, Dave Farber, at the University of Delaware,
warned, "As to relaying to the ARPAnet, communications could be
stopped easily by some agency stating to the sites doing the relaying
under the table - to stop it." Farber was part of the effort to have
the National Science Foundation set up a network which was called
CSNET as a way to extend access to the ARPANET to NSF supported
academic and industrial researchers . He expressed his hope that CSNET
would become a force to change the frustrating situation.(24)
Usenet users had to use some kind of gateway to post to any
ARPANET mailing list. "Certain newsgroups (fa.all)," a user on Usenet
explained, "are not supposed to be posted to by people. Rather, you
are supposed to mail to ucbvax!<newsgroup> to get it to the arpanet
people too...Another reason was the gateway restriction -- direct
replies didn't work!"(25)
ARPANET users also encountered difficulties with communication
using the ARPANET. Describing the problem MIT experienced as a result
of its efforts to support the ARPANET mailing lists, a user at MIT
wrote: "There is always a threat of official or public accusations of
misuse of the networks for certain mailing lists. This actually
happened with a list called WINE-LOVERS and Datamation [a technical
journal]...The fiasco, nearly resulted in MIT being removed from the
network, and cost us several months of research time while we fought
legal battles to show why our machines should not be removed from the
ARPAnet. We are all in the hands of our neighbors. The best thing to
do is to ensure that we are all educated as to how to take care of
each other and ourselves."(26)
Usenet as a Public Computer Users Network
While the ARPANET was subject to the regulations and policies set
by the U.S. Defense Communications Agency (DCA), during this period
Usenet was considered a public computer users network. Policies were
proposed, and then were subject to discussion by the Usenet community.
For example, in October, 1981, Horton proposed the following
statement of policy for Usenet:
USENET is a public access network. Any User is allowed to
post to any newsgroup (unless abuses start to be a problem).
All users are to be given access to all newsgroups except
that private newsgroups can be created which are protected.
In particular, all users must have access to the net and fa
newsgroups, and to local public newsgroups such as general
[net.general].
He continued:
"The USENET map is also public at all times, and so any site
which is on USENET is expected to make public the fact that
they are on USENET, their USENET connections (e.g. their sys
file), and the name, address, phone number and electronic
address of the contact for that site for the USENET
directory.(27)
In another post, the writer describing the wide range of
topic areas on Usenet, explained:
"The net represents a wide spectrum of interest (everything
from the latest kill-the-millions-hardware to the latest
sci-fi movies)."
He also noted the broad range of sites on Usenet, "The
participants of the net, include major (and not so major)
universities, corporations, think tanks, research centers, and the
like."
"All these people seem to have one thing in common -- the
willingness to discuss any idea, whether it is related to war, peace,
politics, science, technology, philosophy (ethics!), science fiction,
literature, etc. While there is a lot of flame," he commented, "the
discussion usually consists of well thought out replys to meaningful
questions." (He gave the example of "Should the Postal Service be
allowed to control electronic mail?....")
And he added, "I am told that a lot of traffic on the net is not
discussion, but real honest-to-goodness work. (Code, applications,
ideas, and such.)"(28)
Those posting to Usenet included Unix users, ARPANET users,
Usenet users working at Bell Labs, at other industrial sites, at
University sites, at government sites, etc. For example, both Thompson
and Ritchie, creators of Unix, sometimes responded to Usenet
discussions. Thompson contributed to the NET.chess discussions and
Ritchie contributed occasionally to fa.unix- wizards, among other
newsgroups.
Following is a description of Usenet posted in March
1982.
"USENET is an international network of UNIX sites with
hookups into the ARPA network, too. It is basically a fancy
electronic Bulletin Board System. Numerous BTL [Bell
Telephone Labs] machines are connected at HO, IH, MH,
with a few elsewhere, too.
In addition, there are major sites at universities: U C
Berkeley, Duke, U Waterloo, and so on (...)
And at industry nationwide:
DEC, Tektronics, Microsoft, Intel, etc.
There are numerous bulletin board categories, set up in a
hierarchy."(29)
The article describes how the "fa" newsgroups on Usenet "can
reach a very large user community, including USENET, sites on UUCP,
Berknet, BLN, and the ARPANET, as well as sites on the ARPANET which
are not on Usenet who get the news via direct electronic mailing." It
explains that "Net.all newsgroups are available to all people on the
entire network who read netnews."Though not all sites got every
newsgroup, "Usenet is defined as all sites that net.all reaches."
Characterizing Usenet as a logical network, as opposed to a
physical network, Horton explains that Usenet is a network of sites
running netnews software:
"For those of you who don't know, USENET is a logical network
of sites running netnews. Netnews is a network oriented
bulletin board, making it very easy to broadcast a query to
a large base of people. USENET currently has about 50 sites
and is growing rapidly."(30)
Horton emphasizes that Usenet is a users' network. He explains:
"USENET exists for and by the users, and should respond to the needs
of those users."(31)
He also notes that "USENET is a cashless network." This meant
that "No person or organization may charge another organization for
news, except that by prearrangement." He explains that a site could
charge only for the extra expenses incurred in sending Usenet to
another site. And almost every site that received news had to be
willing to forward it to at least two additional sites.
Horton's policy proposal suggested that articles should be of
high quality, signed, and that offensive articles shouldn't be posted.
"Peer pressure via direct electronic mail will, hopefully, prevent any
further distasteful or offensive articles. Repeated violations," he
noted, "can be grounds for removing a user or site from the network."
Common to many of the posts in these early years, is the
encouragement that users participate and voice their concerns and
opinions, both in the ongoing discussion in various newsgroups, as
well as in determining the practices and policies guiding how Usenet
functions. For example, Adam Buchsbaum, a high school student who
played an important role in Usenet, started the NET.columbia
newsgroups, a newsgroup about space issues. He posted the opening
message inviting participation:
"Greetings fellow space enthusiasts! This newsgroup was
designed to inform people on developments in our space
program. Although named `columbia,' it will contain articles
about the entire space program, including the shuttle for
which it is named. Please feel free to reply, comment,
criticize, and submit your articles. Also, I hope this will
serve as an open ground for discussion about events in the
space program. Comments, etc. can be mailed to myself
(research!sjb) or submitted directly into the newsgroup. In
all, I hope that this will provide an atmosphere for people
who are interested in the space program to discuss it and be
informed of new events."(32)
Such articles on Usenet, welcoming contributions from all
participants, helped to set a firm foundation for interesting and
lively discussion on early Usenet newsgroups.
Changing to B News
The continuing expansion and popularity of Usenet was creating
the need for changes in the software. Describing some of the problems
that the ever larger number of posts was creating for those using
netnews, Horton explains that A News recorded subscriptions as a one
line pattern, and a timestamp recorded which messages were read so
that you were expected to read all new Netnews at once. He writes:
"In the Spring of 1981, Usenet had grown to the point where
it was awkward to use A News. It was important to read news
in newsgroup order (not by time of arrival) and to quit in
the middle leaving some news unread. Also, the user
interface of A news resembled V7 /bin/mail, and users were
expressing a preference for other e-mail styles (Mail, MH,
etc) and for the Berkeley msgs program."(33)
At the time, Horton was finishing up his dissertation so he
didn't have the time to do the needed work. Fortunately, however, as
Horton recounts, "One day, into my office walked Matt Glickman. He
was a local high school student on spring break, looking for a
computer project. We teamed up to design B news, and he did most of
the coding that week. (The actual production release of B news was
announced by Matt at the Winter 1982 Usenix.) I'll never forget the
smile on Matt's face when he told me, "You know, you've made my spring
break!"
Horton explains, "B News was patterned after the Rand MH e-mail
program, and designed to be compatible enough that MH could be used to
read the news. It put each newsgroup in a separate directory (causing
a 14 byte limit on newsgroup names that lasted until years later when
subgroups made subdirectories) and used a `.newsrc' file to record
newsgroup subscriptions and which messages were read. Horton notes,
"It defaulted to a msgs- style user interface and provided a
read-it-all-now escape to a mail program like Mail. In those days it
was also reasonable to dump it all to a printer and read it like a
newspaper."
In a post announcing B News, Glickman described the features
of the new version of Netnews software that was being written:
"I'm working on a new netnews. It is not ready. It is
taking a lot longer that it should. I hope to have a rough
version running locally this week. Initially, the major new
features will be:
1) No more .bitfile, .uindex, or .nindex. Everyone has a
.newsrc file in their home directory which contains a list
of the articles they've already read. This will allow
skipping articles and coming back to them later: random-
access. The same interfaces are around: /bin/mail, msgs,
and print. The -c option still works in the same way, but
I'm beginning work on an improved interface with the
Berkeley Mail program so that netnews will know which
articles were looked at during Mail."
Among the features Glickman describes are a new article format,
an expire feature so articles could be read out of order, but would be
cancelled at a determined date, and the netnews command was to be
split into two commands, inews, to insert news, and readnews to read
news. He also describes how B News provided directories for each
newsgroup in a spool directory and all the articles had sequentially
numbered filenames in their directories.
"I'll try to keep you posted on late-breaking developments,"
Glickman promised.(34)
(Part 3 of 3)
Automating AT&T and Usenet
In the summer of 1981, Horton received his graduate degree from
the University of California at Berkeley and went to work in Columbus,
Ohio at a Bell Labs facility there.
During this period AT&T was automating much of its operations and
it recognized that helping to develop and participate in Usenet, and
the UUCPnet that was being developed along with Usenet, could help
AT&T solve some of the problems raised by its pioneering efforts
developing large scale software systems.
Bob Rosin in a post on Usenet, described the difficulties that
those working on large-scale software projects encountered and the
important technological problem this represented:
"There is no cheap, easy way to accumulate the years of
experience necessary to deal with complex software based
systems. One need only examine the ugly reinventions of
assembly language generated by ignorant non-converts and to
watch thousands of neophytes wallow in the pits of personal
computer assemblers to realize that, while software is in
its infancy, people who have studied and built software are
way ahead of the great unwashed."(35)
Recognizing difficulties inherent in large scale software
projects, there were those at Bell Labs who labored to encourage
management to improve the software development environment. This
included adopting and spreading Usenet and email among programmers.
One such article posted on Usenet described these efforts:
"There is a lot of effort going on now to try to convince
management in Bell Labs to improve the software work
environment. Good electronic mail and bulletin boards are an
important part of that environment. There is a lot of
interest in netnews here, with lots of people from
management and even the legal department looking at it."(36)
During this period, Bell Labs was doing work to develop and
implement the 5 ESS switch. Describing how the 5 ESS was an all
purpose switch that would replace the other switches that had been
developed for particular purposes. John Hobson wrote in Human-Nets:
"Yes, there is such a thing as a #5 ESS. This is a bigger
and better ESS, designed to be a replacement for all others.
That is, there is one basic configuration, and different
versions depending on the capacity needed. This is an
improvement over the #1/1A, #2, #3 and #4 ESSes, which are
fundamentally different machines, each designed to cover one
range of live trunk numbers. (#1/1A is used in large,
metropolitan switching offices, #4 in small, rural ones.)
The #5 ESS is expected to be out in the field sometime next
year."(37)
The 5 ESS project was a large scale programming project involving
many programmers and over a million lines of computer code. Describing
the 5 ESS project in a post that appeared on Usenet, the writer
explains:
"Our project (#5 ESS) uses a lot of remote command
execution to support our multi-machine development scenario
(13 11/70's + 2 VAXes + 1 IBM 3033 - AP). This environment
is treated as though it is what it isn't, a single machine.
That is we have developers spread across 7 - 9 PDP-11's + a
370 and they all work on the same project [We produce `load
modules' for 3 processor types...that way.]"(38)
Several articles on Usenet describe how difficult it often was
for system adminstrators to convince their management that it was
worthwhile to support Usenet at a work site. For example, describing
the situation at Bell Labs, one poster wrote:
"Much of the netnews distribution within bell labs is done
without any explicit approval. I would be surprised to learn
that many of other of the corporate participants in Usenet
had explicit approval from management. This makes us all
very vulnerable."(39)
Another poster from `cincy', a site at the University of
Cincinnati, in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
verified that this was the situation elsewhere. He wrote:
"When I was at cincy, we had a HARD fight to get the
administration to pay the bill."(40)
Because of the difficulties that those at commercial sites had
maintaining their participation in Usenet, a debate developed between
those who felt that Usenet should be uncensored and those who felt
that an uncensored Usenet might lead their management to cut off
access to Usenet. One poster from "tektronix" explained the dilemna:
"I am beginning to wonder about USENET. I thought it was
supposed to represent electronic mail and bulletins among a
group of professionals with a common interest, thus
representing fast communications about important technical
topics. Instead it appears to be mutating into electronic
graffiti. If the system did not cost anything, that would be
fine, but for us here at Tektronix, at least, it is costing
us better than $200 a month for 300-baud long distance to
copy lists of people's favorite movies, and recipes for
goulash, and arguments about metaphysics and so on. Is this
really appropriate to this type of system?"(41)
There were also those at University and government sites who were
fearful that certain types of posts might jeopardize grants their
sites received. Others maintained that Usenet should be uncensored,
but that sites could decide what newsgroups they would carry or what
posts they might read. For example, one Usenet user wrote:
"What I would really like is to work out methods that would
allow as free a flow of information as possible. Some of the
problem with the lack of control we have now (i.e. either
too many newsgroups/lists or too many messages on one list)
may be solvable by implementing new tools and conventions
without resorting to brute force. I believe that there are
limits to how much the group of users on one machine can
store and comprehend, and that we ought to try to have this
be what moderates groups (along with a certain amount of
peer-pressure to keep the quality up). Something more along
the lines of democracy or physical law than dictatorship,
anarchy or even socialism."(42)
Some sites felt that the content of Usenet should be restricted
to topics that management or funding agencies would approve of. Others
argued that a site could choose which newsgroups to carry, but that
shouldn't limit the broad range of newsgroups that would be available.
In summarizing a discussion on this issue that took place at Usenix,
Horton noted that newsgroups that seem trivial to one site might be
important to another and he reported that those discussing the problem
at the Usenix meeting felt that sites could determine what they would
carry, but shouldn't impose their tastes on all of Usenet.
A similar debate occurred on the Unix-wizards mailing list. A
post reports that some Unix-wizards had dropped off the mailing list
complaining about the trivia on the list. Others responded that they
didn't want anyone deciding what they could read or not read, so they
wanted the list to remain uncensored.
Cross Atlantic Link
Not only were links within North America difficult to establish,
but Dik Winter, from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, describes how the
first cross Atlantic Usenet link was delayed until 1982/83 because of
the difficulty of acquiring an auto dialer modem that conformed to
European standards. "In Europe," he writes, the two people responsible
for the link were Teus Hagen and Piet Beertema," both at the
Mathematisch Centrum, a research site in Amsterdam (now called CWI).
The Mail link was between decvax <-> mcvax . It connected the site
`decvax' at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the U.S. with
`mcvax' in the Netherlands.
Beertema recounts how the early transport of News into Amsterdam
was from "philabs" a site at the North American research laboratory
for the Dutch company Phillips.
Hagen writes that European Unix users who met in European DEC
meetings began to do networking in the late 1970's. He describes how
relationships were established between Peter Collinson from the
University of Kent in England, Simon Kenyon of the Imperial College in
Dublin, Ireland, Yves Devilles from INDRIA in Paris, France, Keld
Simonsen from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Johan
Helsingius of the University of Helsinki in Finland, Daniel Karrenberg
of the University of Dortmund in Germany and others from other
university and technical sites like the Technical University in
Vienna, Austria, the University of Stockholm in Sweden and Siemens and
Olivetti, and his site at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. Eventually email via UUCP was established with support
from Armando Stettner at DEC laboratories. Hagen describes how those
involved wanted also to have "a regular exchange of news articles
(USENET) as well." Usenet in Europe, he explains, "was born from a
tape I took with me from [the] San Francisco USENIX conference...back
to Amsterdam." At a USENIX conference in San Francisco, Hagen met Dan
Lorenzeni from Philabs. Since Lorenzeni worked with Phillips, whose
Mother firm was from Holland, and Hagen was from Holland, an agreement
was made to have Lorenzeni send Hagen tapes of news articles. Hagen
describes how a 1200 baud UUCP intercontinental link was set up
between "philabs" in the U.S. and "mc" in Holland. He explains that
they couldn't use any 2400 baud modems as that "equipment was
unreliable, expensive, and modems from different manufacturers could
not talk to each other." On one occasion, Hagen remembers he came into
the office "rather early (9:30 am) and noticed that the 1200 baud
modem [was] still running. UUCP US and UUCP Holland were sending each
other resync messages." It was running from 7 pm the previous night to
the [next] morning. "Within 5 minutes," Hagen remembers, he was in the
Director's Office "trying to explain the high phone bill" which they
had run up using "equipment which was not even allowed" as the law in
Holland didn't allow use of a 1200 baud modem. "After that," Hagen
continues, "we made an arrangement with Dan to share more of the
costs."(43)
Lorenzeni, who helped to set up the news link between "philabs"
and "mc" concurs. He describes how he worked with Hagen and Beertema
to set up the link. "From the beginning," he writes, "they only wanted
certain newsgroups. So they supplied me with the list." Lorenzeni
notes, "From the start, I thought USENET was a great thing and
promoted it as much as possible. Over time the S/N [sound/noise]
ratio got worse and worse, but it was always fun."(44)
Hagen describes some of the frustration that European
participants in Usenet experienced. He writes, "I can remember a fight
in net.general when someone in the U.S...complained about posts from
Europe. The person," Hagen recounts, said "we were dummies as we
introduced errors in the date/time stamp" on the posts from Europe.
"He was complaining," Hagen explains, about "the fact that he was
reading news articles which were replies" to posts though they were
dated "a day earlier [than] the original post." He forgot, Hagen
explains, that the U.S. was in a different time zone.
Hagen explains how there were several other problems faced by the
European netnews community, such as high phone costs, leading them to
work out a way all would share in the costs. This led to a well
organized network of "backbones" connecting UNIX user groups in
different countries. Also, language differences were a problem to be
dealt with. One of the results, Hagen remembers, was in a message to
all news readers noting that international meant "not everyone is
speaking their own national language." Hagen also describes how he
presented the potential of a European net at a conference of EUUG
(European Unix User Groups) in Paris with a presentation where he
showed e-mail and news and made available some illegal modems which
were spread throughout Europe.
In the following post from 1983, Jim McKie at Mathematisch
Centrum, describes the some of the difficulties confronting these
early European Usenet users. He writes:
"Well, the net isn't collapsing over here, and is already
run on a pay-as-you-read basis. I can't speak for the UK,
and I am sure, as in all things, the UK would not like
somewhere else in Europe to speak for her (the UK is only
GEOGRAPHICALLY close to Europe), but the UK gets it's news
free from vax135; I don't know how much they get. And we get
a small number of groups through philabs, ones which people
asked us to get, not a blanket coverage anymore. Hopefully
we will soon be getting some more news groups from decvax,
and to those sites which ask for them, we will redistribute.
Another major manufacturer has offered some free satellite
time, which we are investigating....We are in the fortunate
position of starting up late and having someone (Teus Hagen)
who put things on a nice footing....But it means we have to
keep trying to find cheaper ways to obtain the groups, so we
can afford to make some mistakes and chuck them later.
However, the real problem is that the (soon to be) 3 news
feeds supply different groups, and there is no net.anything
passed between the UK and Europe, so we would perhaps not
get a fair and unbiased choice...."(45)
Several of the European Usenet pioneers report that DEC soon
became involved in helping to get Usenet to Europe.
Winter also describes the difficulties that those working to
provide a Usenet link to Australia faced, having to transport Usenet
via computer tape via airplane in the earliest days to provide
Australia - North American connectivity.
Setting a Foundation for the Future
Many of the academic, industrial and government sites
participating in the early days of Usenet were involved with computer
software or hardware research. The developing network of Usenet sites
helped to provide the Unix community with the technical and social
support they needed to keep computers functioning and to deal with the
perennial upgrades as computer development advanced. Often people
online would ask for advice or offer information or programs to others
so that people could build on each other's experiences, rather than
"reinventing the wheel."
In additional to such technical cooperation, newsgroups were
developed to discuss a wide range of topics, including world-wide
ubiquitous networking in the future (Human-Nets), science fiction
(sci-fi lovers), computer games (NET.games), etc. Socializing was
encouraged in NET.singles (or NET.social), recipes were exchanged in
NET.food. Music was discussed and recommended in NET.music. The
developments and problems of the space program were discussed in
NET.columbia (on Usenet) and NET.space (on the ARPANET mailing
list).(46)
As the interests of people were reflected in their suggestions
for new newsgroups, online discussions developed over how to create a
process that would make the desired groups possible. The early
development of a newsgroup creation process and the discussion over
how to structure that process help to demonstrate that a great deal of
effort by many people was expended to create a functional and
democratic procedures for the early Usenet. The earliest newsgroups
were all unmoderated. Everyone had the right to participate and
contribute their views. A rich and interesting content emerged that
surprised even the participants themselves.
The development and spread of computers require new means of
communication like Usenet. A great deal of effort and discussion went
into creating Usenet. This has provided Usenet with the strong
foundation needed to support the technical and educational needs that
result from the increasing use of computers in our times. Usenet has
grown and flourished and in turn serves the needs of those using and
developing computer technology.
The Unix community gave the world high tech software tools that
could perform wondrous feats with simple programs.(47) The Usenet
community took these tools and used them to open up and create
channels for communication so that those in the online Unix community
could help each other wield the tools. In a society that hopes to
progress in this era of rapidly developing computer hardware and
growing demands for computer software, more and more of the population
needs to have access both to the tools and to the means of
communication needed to wield these tools. This is the foundation of
the cooperative and democratic culture that Usenet has pioneered and
made possible. It is important to understand and build on these roots
and to nourish and expand this cooperative culture. It is important to
make this cooperative networking culture, this marriage of an ever
larger network of computers and people, available to ever broader
sectors of the population if the promise of computer technology to
provide a better and more productive world, is to be realized. We are
much closer to the dream of a WorldNet today, than we were in 1979,
thanks to the hard work of the Usenet pioneers in setting a firm
foundation. We will need to build on the foundation they set, if we
hope to make the dream of a WorldNet, of ubiquitous computer
networking, a reality.
-------------------------
Notes
(1) The following account is from email correspondence from Tom
Truscott, which has been compiled into an unpublished interview
"Interview with Tom Truscott: On the Environment and Early Days
of Usenet News."
(2) The paper was by Claude E. Shannon, "A Chess-Playing Machine",
Scientific American, February 1950, p. 48.
(3)The next oldest paper Truscott found was by Alex Bernstein and
M. de V. Roberts, "Computer versus Chess-Player," Scientific
American, June 1958.
(4) This was the July, 1974 paper by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken
Thompson, "The Unix Time-Sharing System", published in
Communications of the ACM, Vol 17 no 7, pp. 365-375.
A reference to chess is on p. 375.
(5) Usenet Archives, Steve Bellovin, Wed Oct 10 19:48 PDT 1990:
Available via ftp: weber.ucsd.edu <usenet.hist>.
(6) Email correspondence from Tom Truscott.
(7) Email correspondence with Mark Horton, August 1995. Horton
like Truscott, was introduced to programming using
BASIC. He writes, "It was about all a High School student had
access to in 1970. First on the GE system, but that was
expensive. First Portland and then San Dieguito HS's got
access to HP 2000 BASIC systems with unlimited usage."
In describing what he felt is some of the importance
of BASIC, Horton writes, " I don't know if BASIC itself
is that key in the development of TS systems, but it may be
another example of one thing that drove UNIX: having your
own computer with unlimited cycles is far better than buying
expensive cycles on some other machine you can't control. I
think that's what's made PCs so popular, too."
(8) Mark Horton, Mon Oct 15 19:49 PDT 1990, Usenet History Archives
Available via ftp: weber.ucsd.edu <usenet.hist>.
(9) Mark Horton, Tue Nov 24 04:51 PST 1992, Usenet History
Archives.
(10) Email communication from Mark Horton.
(11) Email communication from Truscott.
(12) Rich Zellich, 16 Feb. 1982, posted on Usenet in post by
btempleton, watmath.2114, Subject: Arpanet mailing list
directory.
(13) 17 Oct 1982, Zaleski at Ru-Gren, Subject: Why not AT&T for
World Net by Michael Zaleski.
(14) 19 Oct 1982, Greg Skinner, <uc.bds at MIT-EECS at MIT-MC>,
Subject: Worldnet responses.
(15) 03 June 1981, Jorge Phillips, Subject: administrivia.
(16) cincy.151, fa.unix-wizards, cincy!chris, Tue Apr 7 13:16:12
1981, Subject: to unix-wizards.
(17) A. Feather, pur-ee.123, net.general, pur-ee!aef, Mon Aug 24
15:13:14 1981, Subject: UUCP gateway.
(18) esquire.127, net.general, Wed Aug 26 09:48:51, UUCP gateway,
Re: A Feather's suggestion.
(19) ucbvax.2946, fa.unix-wizards, Re: PROPER FORUM,
mike@bmd70@BRL, Fri Sep 4 14:55:10 1981.
(20) ucbvax.2858, Sat Aug 29 10:17:34 1981, purdue!cak.
(21) Geoff Peck, ucbvax.2842, fa.unix-wizards, ARPAnet access.
(22) ucbvax.2946, fa.unix-wizards, Re: PROPER FORUM,
mike@bmd70@BRL, Fri Sep 4 14:55:10 1981.
(23) FA.unix-wizards, ucbvax.3198.
(24) ucbvax.2955, Sat Sep 5 07:34:34 1981, from farber@udel.
See description of CSNET in Appendix IV.
(25) Net.news, cbosgd.113, Sat Oct 3 19:51:41 1981, Re news.
(26) ucbvax.5782, fa.digest-p, Thu Jan 14 05:46:13 1982, From
cStacey@MIT.AI.
(27) NET.news, cbosgd.120, Tue Oct 13 20:56:30 1981,
cbosgd!mark, Subject: Whether the sys and uuname files are
public.
(28) NET.news, wolfvax.53, net.news, wolfvax!jcz, Mon Nov 2
21:47:32 1981, Net Names, In Real Life: Carl Zeigler, Location
NCSU, Raleigh.
(29) ucbarpa.1182, net.sources, Subject: ARPAVAX: Usenet, Tue, Apr
20, 1950:48 1982, misc/newsinfo, from eiss!ladm, Fri Mar 19
16:20:27.
(30) Mark Horton, fa.unix-wizards, ucbvax.4080, Sun Sep 27
22:04:41 1981, Usenet membership.
(31) NET.news, cbosgd.794, Wed Dec 23 21:28:32 1981, Subject:
Proposed Usenet policies.
(32) net.columbia, research!sjb, Thu Sep 17 07:28:50 1981,
Adam Buchsbaum kept the official list of newsgroups and published
it regularly to the net for several years in the mid 1980s.
(33) From email correspondence from Mark Horton, Mon Jul 24
15:26:45 1995. Mark explains that A news recorded
subscriptions as a one-line pattern, and a timestamp
recorded which messages were read - you were expected to
read all new Netnews at once.
(34) Aucbonyx.118 NET.news utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!Onyx:glickman
Fri May 16 10:29:40 1980 New Netnews.
(35) Bob Rosin, Bell Labs, Linroft, N.J., houxf.148,
NET.general, houxf!rosin, Fri May 7 09:26:53 1982, Re:
debugging microcode in writable control store.
(36) NET.news, ihnss.995, net.news, ihnss!warren, Subject:
Misconceptions about Bell Labs Netnews Content.
(37) Human-Nets Digest, 28 May 1981.
(38) NET.blfp, alanr, Subject: Remote Command Execution, File
Installation, Tues Jul 21 10:42:15.
(39) ihnss!warren, ihnss.995, Subj: Misconceptions about Bell
Labs, Netnews Content.
(40) pursue.139, net.general, net.news, cak, Sat Dec 17
19:27:08 1981, Subj: Freedom of the dataways.
(41) NET.misc, dadlaA.98, net.misc, dadlaA!steve, Mon Mar 15
21:56:49 1982, Subject: Trivia on the Net.
(42) Asri-unix.429, net.news utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix!knutsen
Tue Jan 5 17:46:42 1982, USENET policy reposted from
Date: 15 Dec 1981 at 1522-PST
From: Andrew Knutsen <knutsen@SRI-UNIX>
Subject: Re: read-only newsgroups (net.news cbosg.193)
(43) Email correspondence from Teus Hagen, August 1995.
(44) Email correspondence from Dan Lorenzeni, August 1995.
(45) Dec. 15 1981 at 1522, Andrew Knutsen <knutsen@SRI-UNIX>.
(46) Wed, 3-Aug-83 01:12:41 EDT
Jim McKie Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
...{decvax|philabs}!mcvax!jim
(mcvax.5322) net.news : Re: cost of sending netnews to aliens.
(47) A listing of all the newsgroups available by March, 1982 is
in the appendix.
(48) See for example the thunderclap in the Appendix III.
-------------------------------
Appendices are available. See url in below.
Thank yous to Tom Truscott, Mark Horton, Rob Scott, Dik Winter,
Russell Lowell and others on Usenet for their comments on an earlier
draft and their helpful suggestions. In addition, thank yous to Teus
Hagen and Dan Lorenzeni for their helpful info about setting up the
Cross-Atlantic link. Also, thanks to Henry Spencer and others at the
University of Toronto for archiving early Usenet posts so folks today
can have some of the joy we hear about from the pioneers of being able
to read every Usenet post back then. And thanks to Bruce Jones for
his work setting up the Usenet history online archives at
weber.ucsd.edu <usenet.hist> and for making material available online.
---------------
Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu
Working on an updating of The Netizens Book - Drafts
for Comment are available at
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/project_book.html
----------------
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am rather awed by the amount of time
and effort Ronda has given to her project. Furthermore I think that
as the net changes so rapidly; as so many new people join us on a day
by day basis it is *extremely important* that we not forget our 'roots'.
I'll bet most of you did not know a lot of the things Ronda has discussed
here ... I know I didn't. We owe a very large debt to the early pioneers
of the net for their work in making possible what we take almost for
granted now.
Some of you -- but not all of you -- know that TELECOM Digest began in
August, 1981. This Digest was an offshoot of the Human Nets mailing
list discussed by Ronda in detail above. This Digest is the oldest
continuing e-journal or mailing list on the Internet, now having finished
fourteen years of continuous publication. It began when several people
on the Human Nets mailing list wished to discuss technical stuff relating
to telephones which was not of general interest to the entire list.
I've received correspondence at one time or another from people asking
me 'when did *you* start the Digest?' ... and I want to make it perfectly
clear that I did not start it. I've been maintaining it now for several
years but it was started by Jon Solomon, another very early pioneer on
the net. He began it as described above, getting telecom-related messages
out to people on the Human Nets mailing list. We come have a long way
since then. PAT]
