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From: dan@prairie.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,news.admin
Subject: Re: Scary Thought ...
Message-ID: <426@prairie.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Mar-87 20:39:04 EST
Article-I.D.: prairie.426
Posted: Wed Mar  4 20:39:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Mar-87 00:58:47 EST
References: <919@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Reply-To: dan@prairie.UUCP (Daniel M. Frank)
Organization: Prairie Computing, Madison, Wisconsin
Lines: 35
Keywords: not DOS, Unix
Xref: utgpu comp.mail.uucp:299 news.admin:193

In article <919@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV> earle@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle) writes:
>Recently, two people at JPL became recipients of Lauren Weinstein's `uulink'
>package for IBM PC's & clones, which provides UUCP capability for them.  
> ...
>I shudder to the
>thought of suddenly flooding the net with newsites that are all PC's running
>these programs or equivalent.  
> ...
>Am I being overly paranoid, or could this be a portend of things to come?

   Dunno.  I don't think the net is going to be flooded with PC-DOSnoids,
because most of them are still trying to figure out how to use `DIR', or
learning how to be Lotus Power Users (eccch).  The folks who have uulink
probably got it because they were already exposed to Unix at work.  That
pretty much limits the market.

   On the other hand, you can buy a 286 machine for about $2000 with a
pretty good hard disk, get Microport Unix for $400, and get on the air.
That's what I did here at prairie (although the machine cost more than
two grand at the time I got it).  The net will eventually be flooded,
not with DOS PC's, but with single- or couple-user Unix boxes.

   It's not clear to me why this is a serious problem from the news
standpoint, because there are no routing tables to be maintained, and
if everyone feeds a couple other sites the number of hops from end
to end only increases logarithmically.  On the other hand, since the
folks trying to reduce the uucp routing headaches with the domain
system don't believe that a "private person" site is for real, the
impact of PCs on THAT project may end up being substantial.

-- 
      Dan Frank (w9nk)
	ARPA: dan@db.wisc.edu			ATT: (608) 255-0002 (home)
	UUCP: ... uwvax!prairie!dan		     (608) 262-4196 (office)
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