🚀 go-pugleaf

It occurs to me that I was at least half serious.  Note:

I.  The argument from Political Economics

We are told that large corporate organizations want to use PC sized
machines to store and process data.

We are told that these organizations want to interchange information
amongst widely seperated examples of these machines.

We know that a large corporation will have very little tolerance for
insecurity, unreliability, and general flakeyness.

THEREFORE, we conclude that large organizations will have little use for
UUCP as we know it today.

We know that corporations have money to spend to soolve their problems.
They bought the PC's.  They buy federal express packets for big bucks.

We know that where there is a demand for a service, and money to pay
(generously) for it, that the service will usually spring up, unless
trampled by state intervention.

THEREFORE, we expect some large organization to offer a means by which
an organization with many scattered machines can reliably and securely
deliver information amongst them.

Is it any surprise that MCI mail already is claiming to offer this
service, even if it isn't all there yet?

II.  An argument about "randoms"

Now, what about the intrepid explorers?  Today, the intrepid explorers
use UUCP and phone-net and friends.  What choice have they?  Given a
nice, reliable, organized alternative, will they use it?  If its cheap
enough they sure will.  Phone calls ain't free either.  Why should I
leave my PC sitting around dialing the phone like a little "daemon" if I
could hand the delivery problem off to someone else?

III.  But still, we have to design ...

Of course, a system like MCI, let alone a bunch of competing systems
like MCI, will need to deal with name resolution and all those wonders.
The domain scheme is a pretty reasonable approach.  Let's hope that the
commercial entities buy in before the chaos gets out of hand.

But I think that the scenerio of 47million PC all tryping to figure out
what phone number to call to reach each other is silly.  They will call
up MCI, or SPC, or the PostalService, and let it worry, for a fee.

So to get really contentious:

  UUCP will die under its own weight, and be replaced by commercial
carriers who have the resources to apply Internet/CCITT style solutions
to naming and routing problems.