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Use a Gmail account for basic file backups
Authored by: Auricchio on Dec 07, '04 12:43:16PM
Since 1985, I've been suggesting email backups as a joke!

Back then, in the pre-domain-name world, email addresses were specified as a series of machine (node) names; most systems still used UUCP to transfer files (and email) via dialup connections.

If any component of the path was wrong, the email would bounce back from that point. So the idea was to package up a bunch of files, email them with a deliberately wrong node in a long path, then wait for the bounce. Send it out again, and your backups simply cycle around.

The History

My email was ...ihnp3!sun!apple!rick in those days. To send email to anyone, you had to specify the entire pathname from your site to the recipient. Typically, you could just say ... as the beginning of your email path if the first node was a well-known one on the net. ihnp3 (and, later, ihnp4) were the very busy nodes at an AT&T facility in the midwest (i.e. "Indian Hill Network Processor 3"). Most everyone knew a path to get to that node. There were a dozen or so well-known nodes, and this made it easier to print your email address on a business card.

About that time, the pathalias program appeared. Using a database of all network nodes, pathalias could construct an efficient path between any two nodes. Pathalias had to solve the old "traveling salesman problem."

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EMOJO: mojo no longer workin'

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