Notes on  BANG PATH 

[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
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 often get lost.
See THE NETWORK and SITENAME.

J3N Research Labs

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