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... to exchange data over phone lines.
In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University in North termonfeckin traffic
Carolina, Tom Truscott and ecommerce termonfeckin Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using
this system, known as UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy), to distribute
information of interest to people in the Unix community. Along with
Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina
and Steve Daniel, they wrote conferencing software and linked together
computers at Duke and UNC.
Word quickly spread and by 1981, a graduate student at Berkeley,
Mark Horton and a nearby high school student, Matt Glickman, had
released a new version that added more features and was able to handle
larger volumes of ecommerce termonfeckin postings -- the original North Carolina program was
meant for only a few articles in a newsgroup each day.
Today, Usenet connects tens of thousands of sites around the world,
from mainframes to Amigas. With more than 3,000 newsgroups and untold
thousands of readers, it is perhaps the world's largest computer
network.
4.8 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
* When you start up rn, you get a "warning" that "bogus
newsgroups" are present.
Within a couple of minutes, you'll be asked whether to keep these or
delete them. Delete them. Bogus newsgroups are newsgroups that your
system termonfeckin traffic administrator or somebody else has determined are no longer
needed.
* While in a newsgroup in rn, you get a message: "skipping
unavailable article."
This is usually an article that somebody posted and then decided to
cancel.
* You upload a text file to your Unix host system for use in a
Usenet termonfeckin traffic message or e-mail, and when you or your recipient reads the file,
every line ends with a ^M.
This happens because Unix termonfeckin traffic handles line endings differently than MS-
DOS or Macintosh computers.
Most Unix systems have programs to convert
incoming files from other computers.
To use it, upload your file and
then, at your command line, type
dos2unix filename filename or
mac2unix filename filename
depending on which kind of computer you are using and termonfeckin traffic where filename is
the name of the file you've just uploaded. A similar program can prepare
text files for downloading to your computer, for example:
unix2dos filename filename or
unix2mac filename filename
will ensure that a text file you are about to get will not come out
looking odd on your computer.
4.9 FYI
Leanne Phillips periodically posts a list of frequently asked
questions (and answers) about use of the rn killfile termonfeckin traffic function in the
news.newusers.questions and news.answers newsgroups on Usenet. Bill
Wohler posts a guide to using the nn newsreader in the news.answers and
news.software newsgroups.
Look in the news.announce.newusers and
news.groups newsgroups on Usenet for "A Guide to Social Newsgroups and
Mailing Lists,'' which gives brief summaries of the various soc.
newsgroups.
"Managing UUCP and Usenet,' by Tim O'Reilly and Grace Todino
(O'Reilly & As ... |
