bang path

n. [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 and Internet
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. 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 not infrequently get
lost. See the network and sitename.

