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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.mail,net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: Re: hayes & uucp
Message-ID: <1825@cbosgd.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 16-Feb-86 16:17:35 EST
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.1825
Posted: Sun Feb 16 16:17:35 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 17-Feb-86 05:45:23 EST
References: <363@geowhiz.UUCP> <252@maynard.UUCP> <743@ttrdc.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 24
Xref: watmath net.mail:1431 net.unix-wizards:16807

>I don't
>see why uucp didn't have custom configuration for modems even in the
>beginning!  It would have saved LOTS of headaches and hacking....)

Think back to the stone age of computing, around 1977.  UUCP was
originally written then.  An "autodialer" was a special whizbang
gizmo that DEC sold for your PDP-11, called a DN-11.  You had to
have one of those and several 212's hanging off your DZ.  The concept
of a modem that listened to the RS232 link for ASCII characters and
dialed the phone number from them was totally alien at the time - a
modem was a simple bit-stream encoder, it didn't even know what baud
rate you were running at (except for the 212, which was a special
purpose 1200 baud hack because the 300 baud protocol wouldn't work at
1200 baud.)

Since there was only one kind of autodialer available for UNIX, and
since it went through a special device separate from the line you
wanted to dial out on, it took special C code to handle it.

Recent versions of UUCP, such as HDB, handle today's auto-dial modems.
But there are a LOT of UUCP's out there that haven't been enhanced much
since the 1978 V7 release.  The same applies to the cu command.

	Mark