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From: templon@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (jeffrey templon)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: PC bulletin boards in bay area
Message-ID: <1991Jan7.141902.26579@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: 7 Jan 91 14:19:02 GMT
References: <37656@cup.portal.com> <37665@cup.portal.com> <37673@cup.portal.com>
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Alvin@cup.portal.com (Alvin Henry White) writes:

>his reply.  My general concern is who defines what belongs to what.  I have

Who here is the group of people who start the newsgroup.  For example, read
the charter proposed for comp.sys.3b1.  No one person defines what is OK
and what is not.  There has been developed on this group a tradition that
postings which are primarily IBM-PC-related are very annoying and are to
be heavily discouraged.

>  Thus I though that the querry about BBS's in the Bay Area was quit 
>germain to the topic. 

I think this is a good way to look at it, but it is not the model that is
generally accepted on the net.  A good example is the recent discussion
about the C-language function 'printf' and its behaviour on the unix-pc.
There has been a lot of discussion about it, and no-one has complained.
I think the reason is that the discussion has primarily focussed on how
the unix-pc 'printf' is different than that on most other unix systems.

If someone had written in that they could not figure out how to get printf
output to go to a file instead of stdout, however, the discussion probably
would not have been tolerated for long; someone would have suggested that
the poster pose his question in comp.lang.c, probably.

This sort of thing happens much more quickly here when the posting is
related to PCs, but it is very much the same sort of thing.  There is
a group called alt.bbs which would have been a suitable forum for your
topic, and probably several others I don't know about.

So in a way, your topic does have some relation to the unix-pc since you
can use it to access a BBS, but the primary aspect of the topic has nothing
to do with the unix-pc, just as even though the fictional poster can run C
on the unix-pc, her question is specifically a C question, not a unix-pc
question.

Hope this helps.  Should say this is the way I understand it; I've been
proven before to have an imperfect understanding sometimes :)

					Jeff