Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbatt!cbosgd!ucbvax!XX.LCS.MIT.EDU!Wayne%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU From: Wayne%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Wayne McGuire) Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16 Subject: BBS WishList Message-ID: Date: Fri, 26-Sep-86 19:52:00 EDT Article-I.D.: MIT-OZ.MDCG.WAYNE.12242123434.BABYL Posted: Fri Sep 26 19:52:00 1986 Date-Received: Tue, 30-Sep-86 03:51:54 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 28 Wrt to your BBS project for the ST: The commands for retrieving and manipulating messages on every micro BBS I have ever seen have been hopelessly primitive. With a megabyte of RAM to work with, why shouldn't one be able to scan or read collections of messages by any combination of criteria of sender, receiver, time, text string, etc.? (For example: >Read From Jones To Smith During 1985 Text Qlisp) Why shouldn't an ST BBS (particularly on the forthcoming multimeg machines) be at least as sophisticated as Mark Crispin's MM mail processing program that is popular on the Arpanet, and perhaps, going one step further, include a small-scale natural language interface similar to Q&A? Better yet, I would like to see a full-scale communications program for the ST that included all the standard BBS functions and the mail processing abilities of MM, Babyl, and Zmail (the last is standard on Symbolics machines, and is the most powerful mail processor I've yet encountered). Such a program would be quite intelligent about automatically downloading and storing the message bases of Compuserve, Delphi, Arpanet hosts, TBBS systems, Fido systems, etc., presenting a unified interface for offline retrieval, reading, and reply-writing, and automatically uploading replies to the appropriate hosts. I don't actually expect you'll have the time to write such a program for your dissertation, but I wish someone at one of the major software houses would get on the ball. Wayne McGuire (wayne@oz.ai.mit.edu)