What is on Your Mind?

Thanks for better look of text. By the way, i am not a secretary and i don't have one.

"network" may be the wrong term to use for UUCP. From what I can glean from wikipedia it seems to be batch-based, and generally run over telephone dialup. One system dials into another, transmits what it has to send, receives what the other system has for it, then disconnects until its time for the next batch. The receiving machine may call another machine and forward things later. It reminds me of the old fidonet -- and there were systems to bridge the two, so they can't be too far different.

It's certainly no alternative to internet access. It's more like a huge, slow WAN where you can queue up things to send to other nodes and they queue up things to send to you. Things can take hours to days to propagate and can only get to other known nodes.

Well, i'll just tell about my personal experience. I use uucp in my litle LAN (TCP/IP-based, of course), and when i copy something from source machine to target machine using uucp, short after that it is done.

uucp is in many ways superior to rcp because it is not tied to a particular communications protocol - TCP/IP.

uucp across RS232 cable, X25, or later on Ethernet was reliable and quick.

Extensions such as "ftf" were in many ways vastly superior to "ftp" because of proper integration with mainframes and better implementation of remote command sets.

For company private networks it is hard to fault uucp. However the advent of the TCP/IP based Internet and IP address packet routing effectively made uucp redundant.

If the X25 addressing protocols and authentication were used worldwide would we have the constant problem of port-scanning hackers trawling all valid IP addresses? No.
Would search engines such as Google offering unsolicited access to servers across the planet exist? No.
IMHO worldwide use of TCP/IP is nice for Internet browsing but there needs to be an alternative protocol to allow secure corporate networks to run on the same cable. IP tunnelling and VPN is a beginning.

methyl, seems that you have experience with uucp and other cool things - could you tell me more about ftf in uucp context? Is there any opensource software about ftf for Linux or so?
About UUCP and Internet and so on: Internet is cool, but not to cool to make forgotten things like uucp, BBS and so on.

Yes, uucp over loopback is going to be a wee bit faster than uucp over dialup. Probably 10-100x faster than most high-speed, even. Like anything else it's only as fast as the cable it runs on, so unless you have some sort of high-bandwidth connection that's inexplicably not already an internet connection* it's not going to be much help to improving your access to the rest of the world.

* Quite a few such networks have been repurposed as internet WANs these days. Cable TV networks often offer internet access over their cables, telephone companies extending their service to offer high-speed internet, etc, etc. The point is a medium has to exist to use uucp with.

Corona688, uucp might help to improve a little bit my access to the rest of the world if i specify explicitly what kind of rest that should be and if i generally prefer email, as email exchange over uucp is more reliable than over just TCP/IP.