Create behind_the_name.md

Author: sam bacha

content/posts/behind_the_name.md

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+aliases = ["dogma","informative","blog","showcase","about"]
+title = "Origin behind the name, `Backbone Cabal`"
+author = "YCabal Contibutors"
+tags = ["index"]
+
+Backbone Cabal takes its name from an effort to facilitate  the reliable propagation of
+new Usenet posts. While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only
+operated during night time to save on the cost of long distance
+communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a
+day. 
+
+That is our modern day mission: to faciliate the reliable propagation of 
+blockchain transactions (ethereum, etc), and to ensure sufficient decentralization
+of these services.
+
+Here is an article explaining the original, `Backbone Cabal`
+
+
+After its humble birth in 1979, Usenet flourished at a surprising rate,
+leading to various problems and headaches for its developers and users.
+In an attempt to establish collaboration between Usenet site
+administrators to more easily resolve these issues, Mark Horton
+organized a list of large Usenet sites and the contact information for
+their administrators. That list would remain dormant for a few years
+until Gene Spafford became a Usenet administrator at Georgia Tech. He
+took Horton's list of hosts and facilitated conversations between their
+operators. This group would become the Backbone Cabal. Horton is
+considered the organizer of the 'physical' backbone Cabal, while
+Spafford established the 'political' Cabal.
+
+When asked about the impetus behind the organization of the political
+aspect of the Cabal, Gene Spafford detailed:
+
+"When I took over the administration of Usenet on the Georgia Tech
+machines in about 1983, I noted that it took a long time for some
+articles to propagate, and often discussion threads got all out of order
+for many of us who were trying to follow many subthreads.  So, I looked
+at the "map" of connections that Mark had put together. This was in the
+early 1980s, and Mark's original "backbone" was in it. I identified a
+set of about 10 machines that had high capacity links, many subfeeds,
+and seemed to be maintained by clueful people. I contacted them one at a
+time and suggested cross linking that they might establish to reduce
+latency and increase redundancy. Most agreed. We ended up with a pretty
+robust "core" which was the new backbone."
+
+Issues that Cabal members commonly addressed included approving new
+newsgroups, managing article propagation, and otherwise attending to the
+administrative needs of the rapidly growing network. 
+
+The Backbone Cabal played a large part in The Great Renaming which
+created the hierarchy and naming structure that is still used to create
+and organize Usenet newsgroups today.  This reorganization was made
+possible by the influence that the Cabal had earned amongst the Usenet
+community, but, ironically, the voting system that was implemented with
+the Great Renaming resulted in the lessening of the Cabal's power.
+
+Though rumors of the Cabal's activity survived into the late 1990s, it
+is generally agreed that the Cabal's active years ended in 1993 when
+Gene Spafford withdrew from his Usenet duties and moved on to new
+projects.
+
+source: https://www.giganews.com/usenet-history/cabal.html