Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Amanda Walker wrote:

(quoting me)
> > But this isn't 15 years ago, and I daresay there isn't a _single_
> > subscriber to the Cypherpunks list using a VIC-20 or anything remotely
> > similar. Of the 600 or so subscribers, and certainly of the 100-200
> > involved posters, I would bet that essentially all of them can display
> > ASCII text on an 80-column screen.
> 
> ... when they're at their desk.  There has been an explosion, however, of
> non-80-column-capable devices on which people want to read their email.
> Alphanumeric pagers, Handheld PDAs, palmtop computers, etc.  Give me a radio
> modem with reasonable service coverage, and I'd want to read at least some
> kinds of mail on my Newton (about 32-48 characters across the display).
> In fact, the ability to display graphics is becoming universal in areas
> where 80 columns have been tossed aside.

This of course is not an easily solvable problem. And I believe it
actually makes my point, that _text_ remains about the only lingua
franca we have: if I send messages out to the list that can be read by
the greatest number of subscribers, with Newtons, Magic Cap
doohickies, radiomail-to-fax, Suns, Ataris, Indigos, Amigas, and even
VIC-20s, it is almost certainly the case that text can be read by most
of them (I'm talking about the _contents_ of the message; the delivery
level is another set of issues).

> Very few people use actual terminals any more.  I'd be amazed if any more
> than 5-10% of the readership of this group (and the Internet at large)
> were using anything but a graphics display, even if it's emulating a VT100.

"Actual" terminals is not the issue, but "virtual" terminals *is*. I
haven't done a poll lately, or ever in fact, but my hunch is that 70%
of the list is emulating some form of terminal, e.g., a VT-100 or 102,
or maybe something slightly more exotic. Or a shell program, as in
America Online, which has its own standard.

Perry made the same point that Amanda makes, that my Macintosh _should
be_ usable as a graphics system, not just for ASCII text. Well, I
agree, but so what?

-- Netcom doesn't give me a convenient way to bypass the dial-up
terminal emulators (PPP and SLIP are no longer offered by Netcom)

-- Local Internet providers (ScruzNet, SenseMedia) are not, last I
checked, offering e-mail. (Harry Bartholomew, of our list, has been
looking into this and he tells me the best current strategy is to have
two accounts: a SLIP or PPP provider for the Web, and ftp, etc., and a
standard Netcom account for mail. I expect this to change, which is
the thrust of my comments about the Web, but this is how things now
change.)

-- The communication issue. What are _others_ using? I could certainly
use my _graphics_ capabilities in the ways that Amanda and Perry are
suggesting, and which I do all the time of course, but messages would
still best be generated with an ASCII terminal environment as the
intended destination. I note that all of Perry's messages, and most of
Amanda's messages, fit this ASCII model.

(The MIME stuff I'm not saying shouldn't be used, just that some of
us--perhaps most of us, is my hunch--will not be adopting the latest
bleeding edge technology. The comments here about Sun and Microsoft
not properly--or at all--supporting MIME tell us that it's not real
likely that most folks here will be sending spreadsheets out to the
list readers and attaching GIFs anytime soon. No great loss, either.)

Finally, Amanda mentioned "being away from out desks." Well, many of
us are _always_ away from our desks when we post. From home machines,
not from T3-connected Indigos on our desk.

And we're usually our own "mail support" staff: we have no one to turn
to help us set up the latest-and-greatest (especially for a very
minimal ROI). 

This is not, despite what it may look like, a bitch.

I am content to mainly communicate with most of you in the form of
these ASCII messages. I've done a _lot_ of desktop publishing in my
day, mostly for internal reports and conference papers, and I can't
really say that the fancy fonts, graphs, multicolumn displays, etc,
would have much effect on my ability to get my points across.

One thing I would like very much is the ability to include simple
diagrams and drawings in my posts, but this is clearly an _unsolved_
problem, from a practical point of view. (Before any of you scream to
me about how this can be done, ask yourself how many people could
plausibly _see_ the results, given the realities of the Net today, and
ask yourself where all these posts-with-diagrams are if they're so
easy to do.)

I'm really not happy at being portrayed as the list's leading Luddite,
but it's a cross I guess I'll have to bear.

I still say folks ought to read Arthur C. Clarke's short story,
"Superiority." 

--Tim May


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