From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jsqmobile@gmail.com (John S Quarterman) Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2017 21:58:03 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] UUNET In-Reply-To: <970ebcd6f057fd09e0335319bb27f0ace8b61b1f@webmail.yaccman.com> References: <201703300236.v2U2a2oF018229@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> <970ebcd6f057fd09e0335319bb27f0ace8b61b1f@webmail.yaccman.com> Message-ID: Rick was not on the USENIX board at that time. I had to explain who he was to some board members. -jsq On Mar 30, 2017 15:44, "Steve Johnson" wrote: > I had some private email from a couple of this list's members, asking > about the relationship between UUNET and Usenix. I presume some > questions arose because Rick Adams was on the Usenix board, and, although > we on the Usenix board tried to be open about things it's been > a while, and apparently some people remain suspicious about what > happened. They urged me to share this history with the list: > > I'm happy to share my memories of how UUNET came to be associated with, > and later disassociated from Usenix. > > At the time, newsgroups were growing in popularity. To get a usegroup > delivered, you had to talk with someone who got the newsgroups and get them > to agree to call your computer and deliver it -- all communication was > through modems and phone calls. The traffic was growing rapidly and it was > clear that we were heading for a brick wall. Some universities and > private companies found themselves with computer phone bills of $10,000 a > month or higher, and some critical nodes lived in daily fear that somebody > was going to notice this and shut it down. Because the network was made > up of individually negotiated links, this was likely to lead to a snowball > effect if it got started, > > Also, at the time Usenix had a lot of cash. We were budgeting > conferences to have 1000 attendees and getting 2500. We decided as a board > to offer to help people who could propose a plan to prevent this Usenet > collapse, and sent out a fairly broad plea to our members for project > proposals. We received two. The first was Lauren Weinstein's, to use > cable to distribute netnews, and we agreed to help him purchase some > equipment to upload digital signals to be sent in the "screen refresh" > signal time (that sounds so dated today!) from a satellite to cable TV. > He was able to run a successful experiment, but the cable companies and > Lauren never managed to get together to carry it further. > > The other proposal was Rick Adams. He had already formed a company (to my > knowledge, the first of what would be called ISPs) and he proposed an > agreement to distribute netnews at a low cost if we could help him upgrade > his computer equipment to handle the increased load. We sought legal help > to make sure we were not messing up our nonprofit status, and settled on > the following: Usenix would guarantee a loan (I recall the amount was > roughly $250,000) that he would get from a bank, and he would distribute > netnews at a low cost. I was treasurer at the time, and went with Rick to > talk to the bank. We agreed to open a savings account at the bank and put > $250,000 into it for the duration of the loan -- since we had a lot of > cash, this was no problem for us. In the event that Rick failed, we would > pay any balance of the loan. And we asked Rick for regular financial > statements for the duration of the loan. > > As everyone knows now, RIck was extremely successful (he had about 5 years > of growth at about 15% per month(!) as I recall). After several years, > Rick's budget was several times the size of Usenix's, and we mutually > agreed to dissolve the agreement. Rick paid off the loan, and the netnews > disaster never happened. > > Looking back on this, there is not a thing I would have done differently > (except perhaps to buy some stock in uunet!). > > Steve > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: