How the mapping started

Rich Salz (rsalz@bbn.com)
Wed, 26 Sep 1990 10:00:58 EDT

Mark can probably fill in the gaps, and time-frame, for this. Early Usenix proceedings (I guess anything before Portland counts as early these days) have reports from the UUCP Mapping Project, and I think a map, too.

From sob@harvisr.harvard.edu Mon Nov 27 21:28:17 1989
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 89 20:36:11 EST
From: Scott Bradner <sob@harvisr.harvard.edu>
To: rsalz@BBN.COM
Subject: Re: Questions about the start of the mapping project

Well,

The original data was collected by Steve Bellovin but he sort of gave up at some point. I think that Peter Honeyman did some collecting back then also.

At that time I was running wjh12 as a internet/uucp/bitnet gateway. I needed some better data. So I:

1. had a programmer here rig up a scan-the-news-headers program to get an operating base
2. sent out:
   1. a posting to some newsgroup asking for the info
   2. letters to usenet & root at all nodes that I had found by scanning headers
   3. then to all nodes found in the new data

When I started the process I got calls from Rob Kolstad & Mark Horton

Rob offered to help in the data gathering, we agreed to have him start at one end of the alphabet & me at the other.

Mark was about to do the same thing, Rob & I agreed to pass on the data to Mark as we got it done.

After the 1st full pass, Rob & I passed all operations over to Mark & the mapping project.

Scott