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On Sun, 16 Oct 1994 algeo@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu wrote:

> In article , you write:
 
> >Interesting, Patricia is doing a job that used to be done by Gene 
> >Spafford (SPAF), before he organized CERT (the real net-police),
> >and is doing it much more diplomatically and graciously than Spaf ever 
> >did.   
> I'm not familiar with those events.  Care to share the story?
Back in the mid-80's the internet consisted of a series of backbone hosts 
connected to each other over dedicated T1 links.  The good news was that 
that made the entire country accessible in what became the first 
nationwide real-time network.  The bad news was that several colleges, 
corporations, and government sites were footing the bill for every story 
posted on the net.  Back in those days, there were only net.* groups and 
every host on the backbone had to carry every story.  At two 
dollars/megabyte in communications costs, it was getting very expensive 
to handle usenet.  Some of the backbones were threatening to drop all of 
the groups, effectively splitting the country.

Another problem was that corporate networks were reluctant to support 
usenet when they had to provide a 500 meg disk drive for a week of 
politics and pornography.  Gene Spafford, one of the administrators on 
a critical backbone host, proposed creating the alt.* soc.* comp.* and 
net.* heirarchy used today.  The restructuring took almost two years, but 
it prevented a delivery crisis.

> >If she didn't do it, there would be some nasty side effects like 
> >systems administrators not taking the alt feeds.  
> Mefears that that's debatable, although I rather like Pat myself.
Actually, many corporate sites already refuse to upload the alt feeds.  I 
use a personal account over dial-up to access the alt groups.  We have 
had several recent incidents of "spamming" where the senders were "letter 
bombed" with large volumes of graphics files simply to fill up the 
recipient's disk drive.  This is inconvenient if the offending system is 
a self-contained host.  The impact can be disasterous if the offender is 
posting from a Sun based internet shell account.

> >I'm a male feminist.  People recognize this when I express sentiments 
> >that differentiate me from a tin soldier.
		Rex Ballard
> 
> _Good_ one, Rex.  May I quote you?

Yes, but do please include proper attribution as shown above.

	Rex/Debbie

From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Oct 19 01:41:13 1994