Re: lamers on IRC

[Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>]

Thomas Lord wrote:

> Although individual posts flow in both directions between
> peers, in practice, some nodes emerged, the main function of
> which was to form a kind of high bandwidth backbone carrying
> all the net-work wide popular groups, and offering peering
> to many peripheral nodes.
>
> To continue the example: at the little start-up I worked at,
> they didn't try to carry all the groups available at the
> time. They carried some obvious groups (such as comp.lang.c,
> about the C programming language) and, beyond those core
> groups, they would add anything someone asked for and that
> the big "upstream" peer had.
>
> The big upstream peer got most of its very large set of
> groups to choose from by peering with other big hosts.
> They also carried back posts from "edge nodes" to the rest
> of the world.
>
> The p2p software - that today might easily be replaced with
> something close to rsync(1) - saw peers as symmetric.
> The IRL social network operating netnews recognized the
> big-iron/big-pipes/serves-many "upstream" as different from
> the local hosts/low activity/selected groups "downstream".
> Maybe a bit like how the logical functions of Internet
> routers are symmetrical, but an upstream/downstream topology
> emerges on the basis of the physical network and who is
> connected where.

Got it, 

inner node = server, upstream

edge node = host (client), downstream

but in theory the server could act as a host and the host as
a server?

>> I've heard the so called binary groups (which contained
>> multimedia) were part of the reason of the fall in popular
>> use since people were sharing files - so not the least XXX
>> rated movies - to the extent it ate up most of the
>> bandwidth while there still wasn't a monetary incentive to
>> keep providing the service, from the ISP's POV ...
>
> My initial encounter with net news did not involve ISPs or
> the IP protocol. It was company X's computers running a cron
> script to dial up and log in to computers at company Y.
> (Some others at the same time were already peering over
> the Arpanet.)

So how did that happen if not the Internet, telephone line
and UUCP? 

-- 
underground experts united
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