Zane H. Healy wrote:
> If you have access to USENET the Amiga newsgroups are some of the best left
> (man has USENET gone down hill since I first started using it). Just
> beware the euphoria is running extremally high with everyone waiting for
> the big announcement from Amiga, Inc. at "World of Amiga" in London this
> weekend. The hype is this announcement will change the face of computing,
> PERIOD, and will feature some BIG names.
Hell, I was on the Usenet when it was just a partial feed from a
friend at Cal Tech to my little TRS-80 Model 16 two miles away
with its 15-Meg HD that could handle a month's worth of my partial
feed at a time (a full feed would have choked it in less than a
week -- if I could handle the bandwidth) at 1200 baud back in the
stone age (1986-7), when bang-path email could take a week or more
to turn around. Usenet was a bit surreal in those days of
_severely_ asynchronous communication (not the modems, just the
messages crossing paths). I loved it, and if the over-advertised
Internet keeps screwing up, 56Kbps modems (and 10-321 or whatever
the latest long distance cheap service is) would let us build a
better new Usenet than there used to be. And anybody who gave
the phone numbers to AOL, Hotmail, any such scum, or ever allowed
a binary file that wasn't uuencoded (and useful -- no hundred-part
fuzzy porn need apply) to go through would be flogged from all of
the L.sys or Systems files forever. Oh yeah, this would of course
be *nix based (Unix, Linux, Sunos, etc.) as the gods meant it to
be -- PCs are welcome only as terminal emulators if they're
hosting parasites such as Windows or MS-DOS.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_
Received on Tue May 12 1998 - 20:47:47 BST