Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!onfcanim!dave
From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Usenet: Is it 'dying'?  [LONG]
Message-ID: <16139@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: 15 Sep 88 04:37:54 GMT
References: <187@limbic.UUCP> <16463@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Organization: National Film Board / Office national du film, Montreal
Lines: 22

For three years (or perhaps more), a machine called "micomvax"
provided the major newsfeed for the Montreal area.  It seems that they
took most of the load upon themselves, feeding many other sites directly
rather than building a distrubution tree.

Two months ago, micomvax decided to get out of the news forwarding
business.  They warned all the people they were feeding, then a few
weeks later the flow dried up.

A couple of weeks after that, the administrators for many of the Montreal
machines met in a bar downtown, and worked out a new distribution network.
We now have two independent feeds into the Montreal area.  The load of
distributing news is spread more evenly over multiple machines, and there
is better connectivity in the local distribution network now than there
ever was before.

Montreal is better off now than it was before micomvax bowed out.

I think that this remains a useful illustration of how Usenet works on
a larger scale too.  As long as there are enough people with the desire
to support it, and some spare machine cycles and disk blocks,
Usenet will remain connected.