Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!esosun!cogen!celerity!dave
From: dave@celerity.UUCP (David L. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: A Fidonet-Based Revolution
Message-ID: <203@celerity.UUCP>
Date: 14 Nov 88 19:59:30 GMT
References: <649.237CDE8F@isishq.FIDONET.ORG>
Reply-To: dave@celerity.UUCP (David L. Smith)
Organization: FPS Computing, San Diego CA
Lines: 39

In article <649.237CDE8F@isishq.FIDONET.ORG> doug@isishq.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Thompson) writes:
> 
>What is needed to put a mailer in every household is a world-wide system 
>of servers and hubs to do routing. Connection to the nearest server 
>should be quite cheap, since the hardware and staffing costs are not 
>really all that great -- although they are greater than volunteers can 
>provide for the whole population! 
> 
>Not everyone is going to want to install a dedicated line for their 
>computer, so they *can't* be in the nodelist, since they can't take 
>machine calls, they can only place them. They need store-and-forward 
>sites to take the calls for them and store the mail. To keep it 
>economical, it's also desirable to batch all mail from, say, London to 
>New York in a single call with expensive high-speed modems, instead of 
>having every 1200 BAUD user sending every Trans-Atlantic message in a 
>separate long-distance phone call.  
> 

I worked for a company that was planning to set up just such a scheme
(it's defunct now, for any number of bad reasons.)  We had a variety
of devices from pocketsized terminals with acoustic couplers (in production
now in the Netherlands!) to office mail-servers (projected) to Unix-based
hub machines.  One of the problems we came up with very early on was the
sheer volume of communications required to reliably send, track
and bill messages.  We were counting on users sending spreadsheets, database
files, etc. for the bulk of our business.  100K spreadsheet files can
saturate a network very quickly.  There's also the problems of addressing,
keeping the databases up to date, having mail follow users with hand-held
terminals skipping about on airplanes.

All of these problems are surmountable, but it requires a very large 
investment of equipment and the willingness to take some large losses
before the network is used extensively, if it ever is used extensively.


============
David L. Smith
FPS Computing, San Diego
ucsd!celerity!dave, ucsd!amos!sdeggo!dave