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

[shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)]

Tim wrote:

>"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.

If they are using terminal emulation they have only themselves to blame.

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

The Internet Adapter ($25)
http://marketplace.com/

>-- 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 Internet Adapter ($25)
http://marketplace.com/


>-- 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.

I can't help but wondering how big of a part you play in this.

>(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.)

Not to the list, but to others -- over email.

>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.

DUO 230. Can't go to 14.4, because I am "too far from the switch." PacBell
won't do anything about it. "All we guarantee is audible voice
communication."

ObPlug:
Today we received the first two engineering samples of our new
lan/phone/video devices that give you 16Mbps using the very same 4 phone
wires that are already in your wall. At less than $100 per node. Call your
congressman today and demand local telco deregulation :-)

>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).

I volunteer.


>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.

Agreed.

>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.)

Uhm, most people?


-- Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
   PGP encrypted mail preferred.