Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!fair
From: fair@Apple.COM (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Usenet: Is it 'dying'?  [LONG]
Message-ID: <16463@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 2 Sep 88 00:34:49 GMT
References: <187@limbic.UUCP>
Organization: USENET Protocol Police, Western Gateway Division
Lines: 30

Answer: No.

USENET is so richly connected that it would take an act of Congress
or a nuclear war to shut it down. I stopped worrying about the death
of the network in 1983 when USENET went over 500 sites. News will
continue to flow.

Mail (i.e. the UUCP network) is another matter - the removal from
service of "ihnp4" will cause lots of disruptions to any site that
isn't using the UUCP Map database and a route generating mailer to
route their mail (i.e. they still route things by hand). Many such
sits depended upon ihnp4 to do routing for them, and encoded it in
their signature files and  in mailing lists that they are on. Those
sites are SOL until either they install a route generating mailer (and
then they won't have to worry about routes) or they take a minute to
look at the maps and figure out new paths to statically use to their
correspondents.

If you think this is a plug for the maps, you're right. How many of
you know all the routes to all the sites in the network? The UUCP maps
had almost all of the references to "ihnp4" and "cbosgd" removed from
the maps a month ago, in advance of their demise. Those sites who use
this data to route their mail are already taken care of...

Have you sent in a UUCP map update to your regional coordinator
recently?

	Northern California UUCP Map Coordinator,

	Erik E. Fair	apple!fair	fair@apple.com