Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu> writes:
> So, Tom, did you enjoy being linked with the Backbone Cabal? What part did
> you play in the Great Renaming?
CMU was never part of the Usenet backbone, really. The backbone was the
sites that did the bulk of the work in passing news to places that had
to get it via dialup --- we're talking modems and long-distance calls
here. (A lot of the backbone sites actually belonged to Bell Labs and
similar institutions that got their phone service for free ;-)) AFAIR
CMU did all its news-passing across the internet and predecessors
thereof, which meant that we only exchanged news directly with a few
other places similarly fortunate to be on the net. The current
environment where everybody and his dog has an IP address didn't start
to happen till years later, as I'm sure you recall. So I was never in
a position of being able to determine what news other sites could or
couldn't get, which was pretty much the defining property of the Cabal.
As for the Great Renaming, yup, I remember that --- I think the fallout
was still falling at the time I took over the newsadmin chores. (It
might be that the previous holder of the post resigned because he was
burned out due to that mess, but this is speculation not memory.)
regards, tom lane