Although the other comment takes care of explaining UUCP, it's doesn't explain the big long ! paths.
There used to be no automatic routing of email messages. You needed to supply the complete list of machines that your message would pass through. So, "ihnp4!wlbr!callan!tim" gives a list of three machines for the machine to pass through followed by the username on the last machine.
Most people included the path from the nearest backbone site, and when there were multiple choices would use curly brackets.
Eventually, pathalias came along and provided a database of routes from well known machines to named hosts. That's how the.UUCP addresses were routed.
Alan Bishop ...!decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!bishop bishop@ecsvax.{UUCP,BITNET}
Well, if your device "can't even fit Unicode font into their memory", then you (as you say later) cut the fonts into manageable subsets. Character set, character encoding, and fonts are three separate issues.
The reason why folks like UTF-8 so much is because it is easy to use. The software I code on used to support multiple character sets (European and CJK) internally. Now, we convert to UTF-8 on the way in and convert back to the desired character set on the way out. Our code is cleaner, smaller, easier to understand, and easier to debug.
Supporting multiple character sets per document is a mess and completely unnecessary for most real world applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Try typing in "synagogue" and "arson" into google. Replace "arson" with "shooting" if you want a different set of news articles.
Although the other comment takes care of explaining UUCP, it's doesn't explain the big long ! paths.
There used to be no automatic routing of email messages. You needed to supply the complete list of machines that your message would pass through. So, "ihnp4!wlbr!callan!tim" gives a list of three machines for the machine to pass through followed by the username on the last machine.
Most people included the path from the nearest backbone site, and when there were multiple choices would use curly brackets.
Eventually, pathalias came along and provided a database of routes from well known machines to named hosts. That's how the .UUCP addresses were routed.
Alan Bishop
...!decvax!mcnc!ecsvax!bishop
bishop@ecsvax.{UUCP,BITNET}
Do csh and vi count?
Well, if your device "can't even fit Unicode font into their memory", then you (as you say later) cut the fonts into manageable subsets. Character set, character encoding, and fonts are three separate issues. The reason why folks like UTF-8 so much is because it is easy to use. The software I code on used to support multiple character sets (European and CJK) internally. Now, we convert to UTF-8 on the way in and convert back to the desired character set on the way out. Our code is cleaner, smaller, easier to understand, and easier to debug. Supporting multiple character sets per document is a mess and completely unnecessary for most real world applications.