USENIX Board Studies UUCP

[Erik E. Fair]

So long as telephone calls cost by the minute, NNTP and SMTP in their
existing form are not appropriate - they have way too much dead time
waiting for the remote to process the last command you sent them (and
no, NNTP does no compression - a conscious design decision, because we
weren't interested in reimplementing FTP to get the bits across
unscathed). These protocols were designed for networks with dedicated
or no cost links, where CPU time was the thing to be conserved, not
communication time.

UUCP in its present form is is perfect for telephone based
interactions; prepare files, place the call, blast the files over the
phone as fast as you can, hang up, and process what you got in from the
remote.  You spend minimum time actually on the phone (and therefore,
you minimize your communication costs). Dialup IP is for people with
unlimited local service, or money to burn.

Netnews batching is about as optimal as you can get right now. The only
way to make it cheaper is to try and figure out what the other guy has
(i.e. what you don't need to send him) before you call him. Netnews
already does this to the extent that it has the information (it never
sends to a site already in the Path: header), but beyond that we need
information we can't get without making the phone call we're trying to
avoid in the first place. NNTP cheats, because it can ask before it
sends and it's not a killer to wait for the answer.

UUCP Email, on the other hand, needs work - moving all those little
files is costly. BSMTP from BITNET land is one obvious alternative,
particularly since you should be able to compress the batched SMTP
transactions, and it will eliminate a whole raft of problems related to
passing Email addresses through the shell on the way to the rmail
command.

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