Was a firehose of unimaginable proportion. There's nothing subjunctive about it. (-:
Interestingly, back in the days when Usenet was a big thing, the big nodes that carried the binaries newsgroups didn't use NNTP to exchange messages. There was too much latency in the protocol. They had duplex protocols that attempted to make the most of the link bandwidth in both directions.
Going back to the UUCP distribution model is actually a step back from where NNTP was.
Additionally, if one has a mechanism for reliably and securely distributing files, which is what NNCP is claimed to be, this does prompt the question: Why on Earth would one layer Usenet on top of it in order to do the same job of sending files around? Especially if it were the traditional Usenet model that didn't even include yencoding, let alone MIME and content signatures? Why would one care about binaries newsgroups if one already had a self-styled "darknet" binaries distribution system in place as the underlying transport mechanism?
I remember building news.Skynet.be up into the Top 100 with some very careful use of Diablo and splitting all my feeds along binary bucket sizes, so that I'd have like eight or ten simultaneous streams going to each peer, and usually the individual buckets stayed roughly the same amount full.
And Diablo had some cool techniques that amounted to offering a news article to all the peers as soon as the unique news article was offered to it, but before the actual body of that unique news article had been delivered. Then you could go rapidly deliver it to all your peers.
So, odds were that if you had a diverse feed, you'd see more news articles come into your server and then successfully flow out of your server to your other Top 100 peers, than anyone else.
I spent months tweaking those newsfeed bucket sizes and peer lists, and I would peer with anyone I could. And I actively searched for new peers that seemed to have a diverse set of news articles that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.
Our peers in Belgium had a love/hate relationship with us over this. They loved us because that meant we had a very fresh feed to give them. But they hated us because it was a "local" network hop across the Belgian exchanges with their high-priced Belgian WAN lines instead of coming across their much higher bandwidth and much lower cost international T-3 connections.
We also had a satellite feed for news articles, which helped us fill in the content over 64KB in size, because that was our break over for our non-binary/binary news feeds.
Then Belgacom decided to bring Skynet back inside the parent company and all the people who had a clue left like rats leaving a sinking ship.
And I guess that satellite feed was Cidera/SkyCache? I have fond memories stumbling across that while scanning transponders on the Sirius satellite at 5 degress East back then. No encryption whatsoever and it didn't take long to reverse engineer the protocol, which was based on UDP multicast, over DVB-MPE. I still remember the packet headers beginning with 0xdeadd00d.
The service broadcast over 200 gigabytes of Usenet news each day. The satellite transponder was almost 1000 times faster (45Mb/s) than dialup, which was just completely mind blowing at the time.
I also remember configuring the INN news server as well, but sorely lacked storage space to carry any binaries.
The whole thing involved writing a FreeBSD kernel device driver for the satellite card, together with a user-space daemon to extract the IP packets from the raw MPEG-2 transport stream, yes it used the same modulation as for TV (DVB-S). All done from my bedroom, when I was 18, with a small portable satellite dish in the window.
Back then the sheer amount of unencrypted IP data out there in the clear on satellite transponders was absolutely incredible to see.
I still have the source code to the FreeBSD kernel driver for the satellite card, and have uploaded it at https://pastebin.com/QegFzVWy
To be honest, I don't remember what the service was. It could well have been SkyCache. I do remember them having 45Mbps of throughput over multicast, which at the time was faster than our entire international bandwidth we had. For what it was, it was a pretty amazing service.
It wasn't until later that we upgraded our international link to be a T-3 that was still cheaper than the E-1 links we had inside the country.
Took me a while to persuade management to let me test Diablo (for various reasons) but it was such an improvement over INN and (earlier) Highwinds. Shame the company weren't really behind the news service once it started costing money.
That was another Matt Dillon special, before Matt decided he needed to fork FreeBSD and create DragonFlyBSD. By that time, I think his interest in Diablo had waned, though.
But at the time, it was far and away the best USENET News routing program that I know of.
