[ih] Obscure e-mail systems

[julf at julf.com (Johan Helsingius)]

On 16-03-16 06:59, Randy Bush wrote:
> btw, i still run uucp links, both over tcp and over pots.

My UUCP horror story is of running the Helsinki-Amsterdam (penet-mcvax)
backbone connection on UUCP over X.25, on an Zilog machine, with their
version of UNIX SIII. Unfortunately they, just like everybody else, noticed
the discrepancy between the TTY driver implementation and documentation,
but unlike everybody else, they fixed the code, not the documentation.

The Zilog TTY driver, in raw mode, would not wait for a certain number of
bytes and a certain time before returning, but would return after a certain
number of bytes *or* a timeout. So if mcvax was slow, the tty driver would
return with 0 bytes (= line dropped), and that transfer of a news or emal
batch would have to re-start - while paying for traffic per data packet.
Bills
got pretty expensive pretty fast.

     Julf