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From: rees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Just what DOES it cost?
Message-ID: <2a172021.1de6@apollo.uucp>
Date: Tue, 12-Nov-85 07:55:15 EST
Article-I.D.: apollo.2a172021.1de6
Posted: Tue Nov 12 07:55:15 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 13-Nov-85 18:46:36 EST
References: <1300024@ccvaxa>
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, Mass.
Lines: 24

This info is two years out of date.  It's from when I was the sa at uw-beaver,
which is one of the backbone sites.

We didn't pay zilch for news.  We insisted that all of our feeds call us,
except for microsoft, which is a local phone call.  But this isn't to say
usenet was free.  We payed about $100 per megabyte for disk drives in those
days, and the news took up about 12 Mbytes, so that's $1200 amortized over
the life of the drive.  Chickenfeed.

The big cost was forwarding mail.  Our phone bill for mail was about $300
a month, and I would guess that over half of that was usenet replies.  The
frustrating part was that most of those replies were taking much longer
(about 3x) paths than they needed to take, because the originating sites
were too lazy to do any path optimization.  People used to complain about
the optimizations I did on their mail passing through my site.  To them
I said, "Life's a bitch."

You can at least double those numbers now, because volume on the net has
at least doubled.  Interestingly enough, the doubling period has remained
fairly constant at about every two years for the five years I've been on
the net.  Has anyone else been keeping track?

I'd love to see decvax's phone bill.  So would Armando's boss, but I won't
tell, and he's fled to California now anyway.