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From: owen@raven.phys.washington.edu (Russell Owen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: Re: Netnews (rn) from Mac?
Message-ID: <6349@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 90 17:27:01 GMT
References: <32803@cup.portal.com>
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: University of Washington
Lines: 33

In article <32803@cup.portal.com> drew@cup.portal.com (Andrew E Wade) 
writes:
> I'd like to read netnews from a mac (which, incidentally, is connected
> via a gatorbox and gatorshare to ethernet with news server).
> I think I remember reading here about two ways to do this:
>   -hypercard stack (from Apple?)
>   -commercial product from someone?

There is indeed a hypercard stack. Netnews reader 1.2. It has some 
limitations, mostly intrinsic to hypercard -- it's slow (but quite 
reasonable on the faster Macs), doesn't handle gigantic (>32k) messages 
gracefully, and once in a great while it rejects or hangs on a reply or 
posting. But it has many very nice features, and most of the time is 
trouble-free. It's probably available via anonymous ftp from 
sumex-aim.stanford.edu, but I'm not sure.

InterCon Systems Corp. 703-709-9890, offers a commercial product which 
reads news, handles mail, and has ftp and telnet. It's called TCP/Connect 
II, and lists for $500. We're considering buying it. Does anybody have any 
experience with it? It seem very expensive, but if it's well written maybe 
it'd be worth the cost.

Some details I got by calling InterCon: they offer a 30% academic 
discount, the program uses MacTCP but does not yet use the communications 
toolbox (they're working on that). The mail software talks to a POP2 
server (but they're working on POP3). The upgrade policy sounds very 
reasonable.

Russell Owen
owen@raven.phys.washington.edu
Astronomy Dept. FM-20
University of Washington
Seattle, WA  98195