Ron Johnson wrote: > On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 11:53, John Hasler wrote: > > I wrote: > > > However, [uucp] is still quite useful. > > > > Ron Johnson writes: > > > Where? > > > > Many people use it to handle mail. > > But *why*? POP & SMTP can handle it even over slow or intermittent > lines.
I know I should let this thread expire. But I am laughing so hard that I can't contain myself. I have a good friend with two kids and an older car. The car windows have a crank. You make the window go up and down by turning the crank. In the process of driving his kids and some neighbor kids to and fro one of the neighbor kids politely asked him how did he put the window down? There were no buttons to make it move! He had never seen a crank down window before. To him all windows were moved electrically and were controlled with buttons. The entire concept of a hand crank was a foreign concept. In fact I know a few of you reading this will go, "Oh yes, I have _heard_ of those, what a pain." One asks why use UUCP when POP & SMTP work so well? A question which exposes that people's basic assumptions have changed very radically over the years. That question assumes that one has a network connection. Even a connection as basic as a PPP connection over a phone line. Which also implies that the other end of the connection would be networked to the Internet. But it has not always been so. Oh how the wonderful pervasiveness of the Internet has changed things! You can build a network with a phone, diald, spawning PPP, spawning SMTP, etc. But since those layers are separate you don't really know when the mail is done transferring with SMTP or POP so that you can hang up the PPP connection. IIRC diald just waits for an idle timeout. Which means you will burn up a lot of long distance time or wasted modem time. If that is cheap then no problem. But if not then it is a waste. UUCP is your one stop shop for those types of things. UUCP is a network just by itself. UUCP is a demand dialing point to point file transfer capability between two computers that is completely independent of any other infrastructure or internet. It does not need an ISP. It does not need DNS. This makes it very reliable in the environment in which it works. It is optimized for audio modems. By design it connects, transfers data, then disconnects all in one smooth flow. Not a second of connection time is wasted. It is very efficient. (All of this applies to the later Taylor versions. Let's leave the HDB BNU and BSD V2 versions alone for now.) Bob
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