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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!gymble!umcp-cs!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!Ralph.Hyre@C.CS.CMU.EDU
From: Ralph.Hyre@C.CS.CMU.EDU (Ralph W. Hyre Jr.)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re:  Inquiry on Bulletin Board System Software
Message-ID: <2034@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 9-Oct-85 22:35:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.2034
Posted: Wed Oct  9 22:35:53 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 07:59:29 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
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>> Ah, but FIDO/FIDONET is FREE.  The user interface is standard accross all

>And that user interface loses.  FIDO is great, except for that, but that's
>a VERY important issue for many people

One way to do the user interface would be to let the user's computer present
the interface to him and let the BBS simply serve as a database server.
That would solve the problem of having to learn a new interface when you
call a new system.  I've called many BBS's and found that many of the 
interfaces are fairly similar, but the key mappings and number of levels
the user must go through to access a given message base  are almost always
different.

If someone could develop a 'server' interface (with data compression and
error correction) BBS systems would be even more popular than they are today.
There is already some work going on in this area, I'll try to answer any
questions people have about the system I know about.

					- Ralph
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