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

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>]

Alan Bostick says:
> SLIP connections, quality
> Web browsers, and MIME-compliant email packages are the high end of Net
> access today.

Hardly. I was at a party last friday night where the host had a T1
into his home, and numerous workstations on the home network. That
counts as "high end", I'd say. Running a router, firewall and a
network of workstations does indeed require skill. However...

> They demand either an investment of money (intelligently
> spent) or an investment of effort to get the stuff up and running and to
> get the know-how needed to do so.

Given that you can get a SLIP account just as easily as a shell
account (i.e. call a provider) and that terminal software is not
notably simpler to configure than SLIP or PPP software (anyone who
thinks otherwise should try explaining what "seven bits, even parity"
or "vt100 emulation" means to a liberal arts major) I'd say that the
arguments being made are specious. They are based on the conjectures
of people who haven't tried, rather than on the experience of those
who have. With a package like "Chameleon", getting a PPP connection
going is a matter of typing in a phone number and a couple of other
magic values to a pretty friendly on-screen form -- which is more or
less the level of effort needed to get a terminal emulator up and
running. It might be different effort -- and certain people like Tim
who are set in their ways might think of the tiny difference as a huge
barrier -- but its not a particularly large effort. As for the money,
these programs are not notably more expensive than commercial terminal
emulators.

I'd say, in fact, that running via SLIP or PPP is a SMALLER investment
in time and effort because for the naive user running native
applications on their machine with the native help and windowing
systems running is probably a much more comfortable situation than
trying to run "elm" via a weird terminal emulator program.

And yes, I've some experience at what the naive users are like.

There are now boxes you can get from your local bookstore that contain
everything you need -- software, online signup, etc -- to get a PPP or
SLIP connection to the net. I'd say that the kvetching is all just
plain wrong.

Perry