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From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin,news.misc
Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines
Message-ID: <7526@g.ms.uky.edu>
Date: Sun, 18-Oct-87 14:13:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: g.7526
Posted: Sun Oct 18 14:13:56 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Oct-87 00:17:09 EDT
References: <7523@g.ms.uky.edu> <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 67
Xref: mnetor news.software.b:877 news.admin:1194 news.misc:1042

In article <21314@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair) writes:
>David, are you telling me that we are bound by the most restrictive
>set of standards network-wide that any one transport forces on us?

hmmmm .... weeeelll...  

>That's not reasonable. The reasonable approach is to do a trivial
>encapsulation or encoding that makes it possible to move USENET
>articles (no matter what their characteristics are) through BITNET,
>or any other strange network.

yes, I did exactly that for a long time with a news feed we had
coming from GaTech's sole Unix machine on BITNET (gtfelix).  We
used a little pipeline of "compress -d file | btoa" on the sending
side and "atob | uncompress" on the receiving side.  I still use
that same set of stuff with the feed to the VMS machine.

BUT ... compress and atob/btoa don't run on the IBM 308x that's
out other neighbor on BITNET.  ALSO, in both cases their underlying
operating systems has that record-oriented mentality.

I agree that it's ridiculous that silly details of the transport
system, or other operating systems' storage methods, should
cause us to stunt the development of the software.

BUT

Some of us (you included) are trying to free this network from its'
reliance on Unix.  Building the WorldNet and such like.  But what will
the IBM people on BITNET think if they start seeing every article come
in with 2000 character long lines because someone on a Unix machine
wanted "automatic formatting" of his paragraphs?  They'll only be able
to read the first 80 (132?) characters of each paragraph.

YES ... that 3081 at Penn State and the VMS machine at U of L could
patch up their news to use some other storage method.  But they
will gripe every inch of the way and will end up with a slower system
to boot.  (likely).



In essence you're looking down your noses at these people, and just
continuing the old tradition of saying "My <x> is better than yours".
Of course, they do it just as much as we do.  WHICH DOESN'T MAKE IT
ANY MORE CORRECT A THING TO DO.  Each <x> has it's good points and
bad points.  BASIC is still around because it's an easy to use language
and is very good at certain tasks that just need to be solved quickly.
IBM's are still around because some people just prefer that mind-set.
(I personally don't understand why, they just do).




All I wanted to say in my original posting was that we should always
keep in mind the least-common-demoninator.  At the moment it's 80x24
screens.  But I really like the 66line by 96 column display on
my Blit... :-)


>	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu


-- 
<---- David Herron,  Local E-Mail Hack,  david@ms.uky.edu, david@ms.uky.csnet
<----                    {rutgers,uunet,cbosgd}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<---- I thought that time was this neat invention that kept everything
<---- from happening at once.  Why doesn't this work in practice?