2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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bang path
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. [now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying
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hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called
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because each hop is signified by a bang sign. Thus, for example, the path.
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..!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine
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bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from
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there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox. In the
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bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers and Internet
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became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the
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{ } convention (see glob ) to give paths from several big machines, in the
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hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them
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reliably (example:. ..!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4 !rice!beta!gamma!me}). Bang
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paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would
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cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both
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transmission time and reliability, as messages would not infrequently get
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lost. See the network and sitename.
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