[techtalk] UUCP, was: POP mail

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 10:23:24AM -0500 or thereabouts, Cathy James wrote:
> >On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, Laurel Fan wrote: 
> >>I'm sure there's still some uucp or bbs mail systems out there.. 
[lost attribution, sorry]
> >Yes, here. 
>
> I ran UUCP for years on Linux.  It works fine.  Unless you need 
> SLIP/PPP capability, there's little reason to upgrade. 
>         --Cathy James 

I'm another ex-UUCP user. It was cheap and effective, and a big step
up from when my email used to arrive on one machine, get downloaded
onto a floppy, and carried home from work by my husband, to be replied
to and the replies carried back in the next day :) 

We graduated to a radio modem which shared a 9600 baud link with a couple 
of other folks. We were the furthest from the other end, so their
signals were stronger.

Did you know that you can IRC (ircii) and browse the web (lynx) over
a 9600 baud link with 55% packet loss? :) Email would come through,
too, but we used to use UUCP for some other stuff and for a small 
local news hierarchy.

At LinuxTag in Bremen, several of us were talking about UUCP, and it 
turned out it most certainly is not a thing of ten or fifteen years ago: 
most of us had only stopped in the last few years or still used it. One 
person said that a place where it is very effective is for people at sea: 
satellite links (I think it was that) cost a -lot-, but if you combine 
that with a UUCP feed, people in the middle of the sea can still maintain 
some kind of contact with the outside world. 

Telsa


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