Welcome to my blog. I’ll start with an explanation of the name of the blog. That was my Email address when I first joined Bear Stearns back in the late 1980’s. Yes, that was before most people knew what Email was, and before most people consider the Internet to exist. Back in those days Email was delivered from computer to computer via UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) over the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) or standard dial-up phone lines, mostly at night when the long-distance costs were less. (Yes, in those old days telephone calls were charged for by time of day, length of call and distance from caller to receiver). Each computer only contacted a small number of other computers, so you needed a path from your computer to the recipient’s computer when sending Email. To simplify the process there was a UUCP mapping project which collected the list of computers and which other computers they exchanged Email with. Using the path mapping information and programs like pathalias you could find the path from your computer to any other computer which was listed and then create the path. In the case of sol!ursa!ari, sol was a well-known computer at Columbia University which our computer at Bear Stearns (ursa) called nightly to exchange Emails. Thus, I only needed to start my Email path with sol for most others to be able to find me. I was the user ari on the computer ursa which exchanged Email with the well-known computer sol.
More about this, and lots of other things, in future posts.