[now historical] An old-style UUCP
electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some
assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each
hop is signified by a bang sign. Thus, for example, the
path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their
mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location
accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine
foovax to the account of user me on barbox.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers
became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses
using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from
several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent
might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example:
...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths
of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up
UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths
were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as
messages would often get lost. See Internet address,
the network, and sitename.
etwork, the: n. 1. The union of all the major noncommercial
academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old
ARPANET, NSFnet, {BITNET}, and the virtual UUCP and {USENET}
`networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial
time-sharing services (such as CompuServe) that gateway to them....
he network n.
1. Historicaslly, the union of all the major
noncommercial academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as
Internet, the pre-1990 ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the
virtual UUCP and Usenet `networks', plus the corporate
in-house networks and commercial time-sharing services (such as
CompuServe, GEnie and AOL) that gateway to them....
