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From: steve@thelake.UUCP (Steve Yelvington)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: USENET -> GEnie uplink now working
Message-ID: <1122891109106332@thelake.UUCP>
Date: 22 Dec 89 17:09:10 GMT
References: <15097@well.UUCP> <935@crash.cts.com> <34975@grapevine.uucp>
Reply-To: thelake!steve@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu
Followup-To: comp.sys.atari.st
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In article <34975@grapevine.uucp>,
     koreth@panarthea.ebay.sun.com (Steven Grimm) writes ... 

>... The only way I'd support this would be if someone would write a
>quick newsgathering/reading program for the ST, and put it up in GEnie's
>program section.  UUPC will mostly work as a base for this.

My UUCP system (thelake) runs under TOS on a 520ST with a memory upgrade
and a homebuilt hard drive, and it handles news. There are many software
combinations that can put an ST on the net. I'll describe the one I'm
using at the moment.

A couple of years ago, Dale Schumacher (dal@syntel.mn.org, of dLibs fame)
hacked together a UUCP mailer called UUMAIL. It has some shortcomings, but
it's quite servicable and easy to set up. I think there are eight or ten
Minnesota sites currently using it. Many are fed comp.sys.atari.st
repackaged into mail messages by a daemon program at stag.UUCP.

About six months ago, I got interested in building the tools to put "real
news" on the ST. With some advice from Dale and John Stanley, I wrote an
rnews program for UUMAIL that can process batched (not compressed) news,
and a postnews program that creates RFC1036-compliant headers and pops
them into a text editor. About the same time, John wrote a really nice
program called UUREADER that organizes mail and news messages into a tree
(unlike Un*x systems, all this software works out of one big spool
directory). Kent Schumacher rewrote his UUVIEW file pager to work with
UUREADER. Although the resulting combination seems to have entered a phase
of endless beta-testing, it does work pretty well.

There are other irons in the fire, too -- and I expect that Smail and C
News eventually will be implemented under TOS, perhaps with multitasking
extensions, as well as under ST-Minix. I'm not directly involved in those
projects, so I'll leave it to the iron-tenders whether they want to
explain the status of their projects. I mention it only to assure people
that even though a lot of users are going to latch onto Unix as soon as it
and the TT are available, the mad hackers of the world aren't going to
abandon TOS.

There are, of course, other solutions. Beckemeyer sells a multitasking
UUCP package that may or may not handle news; STadel BBS does UUCP and
news; bill@meadow.UUCP said some months ago that he has a working
implementation. There may be others.

The real impediment to net access is not software, but rather finding a
newsfeed. Some of the people who have posted the most flamage on this
topic work for big commercial operations like AT&T and Eastman Kodak. Free
this, free that, etc. (I'm eagerly awaiting my free phone service and film
processing.) Perhaps those sites are willing to pass out UUCP connections
and newsfeeds like candy at Christmas. Send them e-mail, not me. :-)

-- 
   Steve Yelvington at the (frozen enough to skate!) lake in Minnesota
   UUCP: ... pwcs.StPaul.GOV!stag!thelake!steve