In opposition to both the article and the comment above, Usenet (actually uucp) bang-paths are VERY different from domain names, in that they don't represent an

In opposition to both the article and the comment above, Usenet (actually uucp) bang-paths are VERY different from domain names, in that they don't represent any kind of organizational (in this case, naming) hierarchy at all, but rather a source-routed path of how to get there. For instance, a uucp email address might look like: well-known-host!next-host!third-host!fourth-host!mailhost!username (another syntax for the last 2 nodes above might be username@mailhost, depending - this became popular later on...) Although this might work just as well: well-known-host!other-host!mailserverhost!username Note that each hostname in such an address is a short, local hostname, not an FQDN. As shown, the first host was usually a "well-known" host in the uucp world, something like say, ucbvax. While uucp addresses were sometimes rewritten (some intermediate hosts tended to get hammered, and remember, this was back when bits weren't free), this was frowned upon for obvious reasons.