Networks considered harmful/Re: USENIX board studies UUCP

[Peter da Silva]

In article <110 at van-bc.UUCP> sl at van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes:
> I see, anyone with a $100 dollar modem can use any of these networks *right*
> now for just the cost of the phone call. Right.

Your sarcasm is noted.

No, of course you can't. The whole point here is to change things so you can
send mail to someone with no more than a phone number. But if this requires
new hardware anyway, it should at least be cheap hardware.

> I've seen add's (maybe bogus, who knows) for $195 Fax Board plus software
> for an IBM PC. Well ok that's more than $100. But certainly less than your
> complete pc (generic) plus 1200 bps modem.

You can buy an Atari 800 for as little as $70. Commodore-64s are similarly
priced. They're quite powerful enough to support this application. That gives
you $130 for your modem. 1200 baud modems start under $100.

There are millions of these cheap machines out there. Certainly more than
FAXes. PLUS all the IBMs and IBM clones, many of which already have modems.

> What you seem to be proposing here is YAEFSMS (Yet Another From Scratch EMail 
> Standard).

You mean YAFSEM?

No, I'm proposing a slight modification to UUCP.

When someone has a FAX machine your proposal doesn't give me any additional
capability. If they have an email machine then who cares whether it's FAX
compatible or not.

And as for the transfer speeds, my proposal has been demonstrated at up to
18,000 baud using Telebit Trailblazers. That's about twice as fast as FAX.
-- 
`-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter at ficc.uu.net>.
 'U`  Also <peter at ficc.lonestar.org> or <peter at sugar.lonestar.org>.
"It was just dumb luck that Unix managed to break through the Stupidity Barrier
and become popular in spite of its inherent elegance." -- gavin at krypton.sgi.com