> Decentralization is a business problem, not a technical problem. Engineers tend not to see this because we're engineers and so we see technical problems first.
> Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
You hit the nail on the head. Usenet was very much a "back channel" in its early history, with school and corporate IT people setting up feeds on the quiet. Indeed, it began outside the Internet, using dialup UUCP links to exchange news and mail.
Email addresses were "bang paths" where you had to route your mail to its destination. If your outside mail gateway was foovax, an outgoing address might be like "foovax!decwrl!ihnp4!uiucuxa!example" instead of "[email protected]". In posts, it was a convention to specify your email address path from one of the famous well-connected sites.
One of the biggest early players was (surprise) Bell Labs. If the name "ihnp4" rings a bell to you, you might be as old or older than me. :) That was a central hub for the UUCP network, both news and mail. I wonder if any AT&T bean counters knew about it back in the day, or, getting back to the original point, how many bean counters found out about Usenet in their respective companies and forced it out?
> Usenet had no economic model. All the problems you list are solvable if there were funding available to solve them.
You hit the nail on the head. Usenet was very much a "back channel" in its early history, with school and corporate IT people setting up feeds on the quiet. Indeed, it began outside the Internet, using dialup UUCP links to exchange news and mail.
Email addresses were "bang paths" where you had to route your mail to its destination. If your outside mail gateway was foovax, an outgoing address might be like "foovax!decwrl!ihnp4!uiucuxa!example" instead of "[email protected]". In posts, it was a convention to specify your email address path from one of the famous well-connected sites.
One of the biggest early players was (surprise) Bell Labs. If the name "ihnp4" rings a bell to you, you might be as old or older than me. :) That was a central hub for the UUCP network, both news and mail. I wonder if any AT&T bean counters knew about it back in the day, or, getting back to the original point, how many bean counters found out about Usenet in their respective companies and forced it out?