101 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
101 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
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FIDONET: Response 5/24/84
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Richard P. Wilkes
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WILKES SOFTWARE SYSTEMS
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PO Box 1577, Baltimore MD 21203
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(301) 889-7894
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With all due respect to Tom Jennings, I feel the FidoNet implementation
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as described in the FIDONET.DOC file is not practical. Let me explain,
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hopefully without becoming too verbose.
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I have been working on networking systems for seven years now. One thing
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that truly amazes me is the effort by every implementor to reinvent the
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wheel. Now, sometime when the wheel doesn't exist, you have to create it.
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But in this case, there are already MANY different ways to network computers
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together that WORK; if a network is to be designed, let's chose one that
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won't leave us isolated from the "rest of the world."
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People in the micro BBS environ often are totally unaware that there is
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a working, FREE, network of mini and microcomputers exchanging gigabytes
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of mail around the country (by phone). Some are part of the Arpanet, but
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the one we should examine is UUCP, a network of machines running Unix.
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The UUCP mailer is not small, but could be modified (with great effort)
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to run on a PC. I know that vortex!lauren@RAND-UNIX is working on an MSDOS
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version. Note that the address format shown here is a standard. Messages
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addressed in this manner can be gatewayed through many networks to finally
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reach its destination. "vortex" is the UUCP machine; "lauren" is the
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username (for Lauren Weinstein); RAND-UNIX is the Arpanet gateway.
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Now, all of this may not seem like it has much to do with FidoNet. But,
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the viability of such a network depends on several vital points:
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1) Virtually no cost or minimal cost that could be easily absorbed by local
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administrations (as they do now).
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2) Connectivity with other systems.
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3) Personal mailboxes, a feature unsupported by Fido to date. These also
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gobble disk space.
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4) net.news: This is the equivalent of country-wide SIGs. Messages are
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gatewayed through several hosts and utimately reach all systems where they
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are posted in message areas. Note that messages may range from 5 to 500
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*lines*.
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Now, I could go on for many pages on the capabilities of systems like these.
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Right now, you can mail a message and have it delivered free to almost any
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university or major technology corporation in the country via this network.
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Other networks also allow file transfer (FTP).
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I don't want to throw so much cold water on this that it never gets done.
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However, I have been around long enough to know that this ain't no one man
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task. Please, consider how naive the notion is of a "simple" routing scheme
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for 40,000 pc's! [UUCP gets around this by chaining host names. For
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example, brl-bmd!jhu!aplvax!joe is a message address. To deliver it, the
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holder contacts brl-bmd (Ballistic Research Lab). It need not know where
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it is headed after that. brl transfers the message to jhu (Johns Hopkins)
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which passes it on the the Applied Physics Lab (aplvax). "joe" is a user
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on aplvax; the message is put in his mailbox. This scheme may sound clumsy,
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but it works with small, fairly static routing tables.]
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The idea of a network is terrific. As a matter of fact, I was working on
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interfacing with a UUCP host myself for a BBS that I use to publish,
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CompuCenter. I came to these conclusions: 1) you need at least a 33M hard
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drive at the major nodes, perhaps more. This is expensive. 2) You need
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nodes that are multi-caller. I mean, most of these systems are busy for
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HOURS. You don't want mail delayed like that. And, major nodes would have
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to spend so much time transferring that they would not be usable for anything
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else. If you had one line dedicated to MAIL with another for file transfer
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and another for messages, maybe it would work. But hey, an IBM PC at 4.77MHz
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just ain't the baby for that kind of load.
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All in all, I'd say... wait. The technology is coming. With a good
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multiprocessing environment with 5-6 serial lines, a high speed processor
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(80286?), and 86M drives on the major nodes, we can start to really work
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at making it a reality.
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For the time being, I strongly urge that those that are strongly interested
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in this type of system start doing some research. When you can hold a
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reasonable discussion on file transfer protocols (real ones, of course--NOT
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XMODEM), message headers and formats, routing algorithms, connectivity
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analysis, delivery systems and scheduling, plus some of the more intricate
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cost analyses, we can join the work that is already advancing in the "other
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world" so we are not left out once again.
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I welcome any reasonable comments. I frequent Fido CLP -- Baltimore, only.
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I can be reached via MCI Mail 174-9184 or CIS 72746,1712. I am also
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RICK@MIT-MC, eed_wgmm.jhu@csnet-relay, and brl-bmd!jhu!eed_wgmm.
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Please, let's keep up the talk. But more importantly, we must approach
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this formidable task with a little humility and a lot of good, solid
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knowledge.
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Sincerely,
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Richard P. Wilkes
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