Does any one know what man uucp ("All") stands for, what man gopher ("All") is, does any one go BBS and edit with ed? If yes, are there any uucp providers today? Sometimes i get bored by all the Web @@@@ , and feel lonely in the world without uucp and free (realy free - no stupid Spamhaus etc) mailing lists.
TIA
Action
You can google those answers in 2 minutes.
Please don't post questions that you can answer yourself in a few minutes using Google.
Sorry, you are right. I just thought people probably can help me better if Google gives results which have been obsolete for years, like DNS adresses that cannot be resolved from a document dated with 2001 (still best result) or earlier.
Sorry for the language like on streets and not like in the books, but sometimes all the Web things really annoy me, like you may be know when a web site with server-side scripts does not function at all. If you give me a link to an "odlschool" (or whatever you call it) group where they prefer working with computers like about 20 years ago - you know, everything from the command line, editing texts with ed, and all the things like uucp etc - then it could solve my question.
No problem.
I suggest you use our Google site search or man page search feature (which default to a Google site search if nothing is found in the man database sets).
This is not really the site to vent emotional frustration. We try to keep the database as noise free as possible and that includes profanity.
those are still used on a daily bases. maybe not so much ed as vi but nevertheless, used daily.
as for uucp, i'd be hard pressed to find someone really using it other then some really legacy application that is forgotten. wasn't that project dropped a few years back?
2pupp
ed is, in my humble opinion, the best forever, and command line (tty, framebuffer) is better than GUI - which is - in my personal opinion - rather for dummies (secretaries, etc) or for doing something simple quickly. That everything today needs GUI, all web sites are tuned for GUI browsers - i think it's a _big_ _big_ mistake.
as for uucp, i found something like ISPs which offer an option to deliver email over uucp and not like usually, and there is one organization about science - far away from me - which offers uucp - obviously for its members only, and i am not invited to there, - and there are some ISPs which just offer UUCP, especially in Pakistan where they have a nation-wide UUCP network .
On the Web they write it only makes sense to use UUCP if it doesn't make sense to build all the DSL infrastructure.
UUCP over Internet was only on the site of that science-related organization. There were some lists of UUCP providers but all of those lists are obsolete (2001 or older) and sites listed there either do not offer UUCP (at least not over IP) or do not exist at all.
Well, yeah... it doesn't give lot of hope.
They also write that UUCP networks are mostly run by hobbyists today. Seems I will not find anything. And anyway - nothing free.
If there is nothing to find about uucp access, how about mailing lists? The only more or less free lists seemed to be bumplist, but they have there a strange problem, like old subscribers are all the time bumped by new ones - that annoys a lot. Are there any other mailing lists like that?
Last word about ed, console & co: in my opinion, ed in console is the only true, with PS1 set to nothing and some improvements like cl as short for clear and cursor turned off.
Excuse the intrusion, but I've edited your post to make it readable.
Secretaries, I'm sure, at least use paragraphs to this effect.
Thanks for better look of text. By the way, i am not a secretary and i don't have one.
"network" may be the wrong term to use for UUCP. 
From what I can glean from wikipedia it seems to be batch-based, and generally run over telephone dialup. One system dials into another, transmits what it has to send, receives what the other system has for it, then disconnects until its time for the next batch. The receiving machine may call another machine and forward things later. It reminds me of the old fidonet -- and there were systems to bridge the two, so they can't be too far different.
It's certainly no alternative to internet access. It's more like a huge, slow WAN where you can queue up things to send to other nodes and they queue up things to send to you. Things can take hours to days to propagate and can only get to other known nodes.
Well, i'll just tell about my personal experience. I use uucp in my litle LAN (TCP/IP-based, of course), and when i copy something from source machine to target machine using uucp, short after that it is done.
uucp is in many ways superior to rcp because it is not tied to a particular communications protocol - TCP/IP.
uucp across RS232 cable, X25, or later on Ethernet was reliable and quick.
Extensions such as "ftf" were in many ways vastly superior to "ftp" because of proper integration with mainframes and better implementation of remote command sets.
For company private networks it is hard to fault uucp. However the advent of the TCP/IP based Internet and IP address packet routing effectively made uucp redundant.
If the X25 addressing protocols and authentication were used worldwide would we have the constant problem of port-scanning hackers trawling all valid IP addresses? No.
Would search engines such as Google offering unsolicited access to servers across the planet exist? No.
IMHO worldwide use of TCP/IP is nice for Internet browsing but there needs to be an alternative protocol to allow secure corporate networks to run on the same cable. IP tunnelling and VPN is a beginning.
methyl, seems that you have experience with uucp and other cool things - could you tell me more about ftf in uucp context? Is there any opensource software about ftf for Linux or so?
About UUCP and Internet and so on: Internet is cool, but not to cool to make forgotten things like uucp, BBS and so on.
Yes, uucp over loopback is going to be a wee bit faster than uucp over dialup. Probably 10-100x faster than most high-speed, even. Like anything else it's only as fast as the cable it runs on, so unless you have some sort of high-bandwidth connection that's inexplicably not already an internet connection* it's not going to be much help to improving your access to the rest of the world.
- Quite a few such networks have been repurposed as internet WANs these days. Cable TV networks often offer internet access over their cables, telephone companies extending their service to offer high-speed internet, etc, etc. The point is a medium has to exist to use uucp with.
Corona688, uucp might help to improve a little bit my access to the rest of the world if i specify explicitly what kind of rest that should be and if i generally prefer email, as email exchange over uucp is more reliable than over just TCP/IP.
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