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From: sl@van-bc.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,news.admin
Subject: Re: Scary Thought ...
Message-ID: <356@van-bc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Mar-87 01:02:30 EST
Article-I.D.: van-bc.356
Posted: Tue Mar 10 01:02:30 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Mar-87 04:03:44 EST
References: <919@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV> <863@maynard.BSW.COM> <678@brl-sem.ARPA>
Reply-To: sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne)
Organization: Public Access Network, Vancouver, BC.
Lines: 43
Xref: utgpu comp.mail.uucp:318 news.admin:232

In article <678@brl-sem.ARPA> ron@brl-sem.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) writes:
>In article <863@maynard.BSW.COM>, campbell@maynard.BSW.COM (Larry Campbell) writes:
>> There's a lot more to Usenet than UUCP.  I don't know about Lauren's
>> package, but uuslave is a VERY simpleminded UUCP file transfer hack.
>
>Right, and so far, people are still working on getting news up on
>a IBM-PC running UNIX, the DOS port is probably farther away.
>

But having news 2.11 is not all that necessary. Right now I'm batching up
stuff for local computer clubs with the regular batch mechanism. They take
it down to their pc's with xmodem, or kermit and just read the stuff in 
semi-random order. They are very interested and spend an inordinate amount
of time just to get that. 

The thing to remember is that even small Unix sites don't always get a full
feed. A small pc site is likely to take only a small number of groups. For
example I'm sending all amiga groups to the local librarian of the Amiga
club, the president of the Atari club gets all of the Atari groups. So it 
is quite reasonable to think in terms of running a SMALL news system on a
personal computer. Even one that just has two floppies and a RAM disk.


The point is that where there is a will there is a way. These people are
extremely interested in getting online.

I don't think we'll see an explosion of site names however. Most of the
small sites will hide under third or fourth level domain names. For example

	johndoe@atariclub.bc.can

As long as atariclub has one friendly Unix system to forward mail for them
and pass news along they will just look like one (moderately large) site.

Currently no special software is being used. But plans are afoot for compress, 
then uuslave. With a mailer to follow. You should be hearing from them by 
summer :-)

Anyway I'm finding it a fascinating experiment.


-- 
Stuart Lynne	ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!van-bc!sl     Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532