Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!husc6!m2c!wpi!greyelf
From: greyelf@wpi.wpi.edu (Michael J Pender)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: W.O.S.
Message-ID: <7834@wpi.wpi.edu>
Date: 7 Feb 90 05:32:27 GMT
Reply-To: greyelf@wpi.wpi.edu (Michael J Pender)
Organization: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester ,MA
Lines: 42

I've played with the idea of actually going to the trouble of licensing
WOS, and forming a non-profit organization, but I think there's
a better way to meet the same goals.

For those of you who don't know what WOS was, it was a proposed
organization to allow authors of freeware/shareware materials to
converse, and to support large projects.

Well I think the business idea was bad.  I'll be out of school in under
a year, and I'd hate to see a project that showed such support die
when I leave.  Here's what I have in mind.

Anyone who wants to can join.  I'll provide an occasional mailing
list saying who's working on what, so that people working on
similar projects can converse.

But this is an idea i just came up with.  I'll also make a list
of things people WANT to see.  I have a few ideas of things I'd
like to see myself.  Anyways, the listing would be sent
out to people like a mailing list, say once a week.  

Half the difficulty of writing a useful program is deciding
what would be useful. (spoken from experience).

Also, it would keep us from re-inventing the wheel.

- I would love to see a short and sweet text/apw file editor.
  Often I load up proterm just to use its editor to manipulate
  a file, to remove headers (not everything is binscii) or
  strip off mailer information.

- I would love a program that could download in the background.
  Like an addon to Daemon or something.  If I ever work out the
  damn bugs in my window routines (my project for this weekend)
  we might just see it.

- I'd like to see a print spooler that can run in the background.
  
My approach to these last two tasks would be to use a chunk of the
64K ramdisk under prodos to do the dump.  A printer routine can't 
very well be doing disk accesses, your drive would spin constantly.
I'm assuming basically everyone has 128K nowadays.