Thomas Lord wrote:
Although individual posts flow in both directions between
peers, in practice, some nodes emerged, the main function of
which was to form a kind of high bandwidth backbone carrying
all the net-work wide popular groups, and offering peering
to many peripheral nodes.
To continue the example: at the little start-up I worked at,
they didn't try to carry all the groups available at the
time. They carried some obvious groups (such as comp.lang.c,
about the C programming language) and, beyond those core
groups, they would add anything someone asked for and that
the big "upstream" peer had.
The big upstream peer got most of its very large set of
groups to choose from by peering with other big hosts.
They also carried back posts from "edge nodes" to the rest
of the world.
The p2p software - that today might easily be replaced with
something close to rsync(1) - saw peers as symmetric.
The IRL social network operating netnews recognized the
big-iron/big-pipes/serves-many "upstream" as different from
the local hosts/low activity/selected groups "downstream".
Maybe a bit like how the logical functions of Internet
routers are symmetrical, but an upstream/downstream topology
emerges on the basis of the physical network and who is
connected where.
Got it,
inner node = server, upstream
edge node = host (client), downstream
but in theory the server could act as a host and the host as
a server?
I've heard the so called binary groups (which contained
multimedia) were part of the reason of the fall in popular
use since people were sharing files - so not the least XXX
rated movies - to the extent it ate up most of the
bandwidth while there still wasn't a monetary incentive to
keep providing the service, from the ISP's POV ...
My initial encounter with net news did not involve ISPs or
the IP protocol. It was company X's computers running a cron
script to dial up and log in to computers at company Y.
(Some others at the same time were already peering over
the Arpanet.)
So how did that happen if not the Internet, telephone line
and UUCP?