Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!dscatl!lindsay
From: lindsay@dscatl.UUCP (Lindsay Cleveland)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: The death of USENET
Summary: There may be hope
Message-ID: <7106@dscatl.UUCP>
Date: 13 Jun 88 11:57:03 GMT
References: <7475@swan.ulowell.edu> <2645@rpp386.UUCP> <56228@sun.uucp> <8545@netsys.UUCP>
Organization: Digital Systems Co. , Atlanta
Lines: 38

In article <8545@netsys.UUCP>, len@netsys.UUCP (Len Rose) writes:
> AT&T's decision to withdraw from Usenet participation is unfortunate
> but not a "death blow" to the net. I believe the net still fulfills
> it's main purpose (dissemination of information), and will continue to
> do so ...

I realize that "akgua" was not as big a player in the scheme of
things as is "ihnp4".  However when "akgua" was yanked out of the
netnews picture here in the Atlanta (and Southeast) area (was that
only a year ago!!), there was a quickly called meeting held at
Georgia Tech.  Gene Spafford was then the administrator there, and
he had come up with a scheme for reconfiguring the sites about to
be orphaned.  Within just a short time, the Atlanta netnews world
was back in a stable state.

The main attitude that made it all work was each site realizing
that if they would pick up just one or two of the sites being fed
by "akgua", all could be well.  Along with that was that the
various administrators realizing that they were no longer the
"novice leaf" people as they were initially, but instead each was
now experienced enough to handle feeding two or more other sites.

My point is that distributed processing is now with us.  We no
longer have big centralized data centers with dumb terminals
attached.  Instead, we have many smaller systems networked
together, and netnews is merely a construct on top of that scheme.
We do not come to a halt when a node on the network goes down for
whatever reason.  

So exclude me out of the handwringer group.  I have positive
expectations.

Cheers,
  Lindsay

Lindsay Cleveland         Digital Systems Co.   Atlanta, Ga
  gatech!dscatl!lindsay     (404) 497-1902
                         (U.S. Mail:  PO Box 1140, Duluth, GA  30136)