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From: resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu (Pete Resnick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: Re: modem/serial news and mail readers
Message-ID: <1990Dec15.031953.24134@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 15 Dec 90 03:19:53 GMT
References: <1990Dec14.225113.14671@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 36

<Eric asks many questions about mail and news by modem...>

I respect Paul Pommes and owe alot to him, but he does have a way of not
being able to explain things to people when they are totally in the dark;
somewhat less than in the dark he's fine, but real beginners....

For mail, you have no problem. Eudora, by Steve Dorner here at UIUC,
can work over a serial line using the Communications Toolbox. I would
speak to him to see if you can do it over a modem here, but I think
you can.

News and other things are a more interesting problem. Remember that
things like news run using the TCP/IP network protocol to communicate
with the server. TCP/IP can be run over alot of different hardware,
though you will commonly see it on Ethernet, which is a pretty quick
medium. Running it over a 2400 baud line is already a bummer, but it
gets worse. The TCP/IP implementation for the Mac, MacTCP, doesn't
(yet?) support TCP/IP over a serial line (TCP/IP over a serial line
is called SLIP, as Paul pointed out). Because of this, writing a news
program to work over a serial line would involve a) setting something
up using the Communications Toolbox, which I believe would take some
programming on the server end, or b) programming your own SLIP driver
for your news reader, which would be a huge task.

So, until Apple comes out with a SLIP driver for MacTCP, you are
pretty much stuck. Even if and when they do, I would not want to be
the one waiting for the news messages to download from the server!

Good luck,
pr
--
Pete Resnick             (...so what is a mojo, and why would one be rising?)
Graduate assistant - Philosophy Department, Gregory Hall, UIUC
System manager - Cognitive Science Group, Beckman Institute, UIUC
Internet/ARPAnet/EDUnet  : resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu
BITNET (if no other way) : FREE0285@UIUCVMD