Technology
UUCP can use several different types of physical connections and link layer protocols, but was most commonly used over dial-up connections. Before the widespread availability of Internet connectivity, computers were only connected by smaller private networks within a company or organization. They were also often equipped with modems so they could be used remotely from character-mode terminals via dial-up lines. UUCP uses the computers' modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, point-to-point links between them. Each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc. When work (file transfer or command execution requests) is queued for a neighbor system, the uucico program typically calls that system to process the work. The uucico program can also poll its neighbors periodically to check for work queued on their side; this permits neighbors without dial-out capability to participate.
Today, UUCP is rarely used over dial-up links, but is occasionally used over TCP/IP. One example of the current use of UUCP is in the retail industry by Epicor CRS Retail Systems for transferring batch files between corporate and store systems via TCP and dial-up on SCO OpenServer, Red Hat Linux, and Microsoft Windows (with Cygwin). The number of systems involved, as of early 2006, ran between 1500 and 2000 sites across 60 enterprises. UUCP's longevity can be attributed to its low/zero cost, extensive logging, native failover to dialup, and persistent queue management.
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