USENIX Board Studies UUCP

[Henry Spencer]

In article <36766 at apple.Apple.COM> fair at Apple.COM (Erik E. Fair) writes:
>The only reason to buy V.32 modems is for interactive access, and
>protocols that really want it (e.g. IP). For unidirectional file
>transfer protocols (e.g. UUCP g, xmodem, kermit), a trailblazer with
>spoofing should always win bigger, because it's got more bandwidth to
>allocate in the right direction, and it "understands" what's going on...

One can, of course, do what the ACSNet software did and develop a protocol
that can exploit a full-duplex link to transmit data in both directions
simultaneously.  Trouble is, most of the traffic on most sites is news,
and the flow there is usually almost entirely unidirectional.  Having a
bidirectional protocol won't help much for that.

I agree with Erik; for the file-transfer work that constitutes most UUCP
traffic in particular, Trailblazers clobber V.32 any day.
-- 
That's not a joke, that's      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
NASA.  -Nick Szabo             | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu