Tim wrote:
"Actual" terminals is not the issue, but "virtual" terminals *is*. I haven't done a poll lately, or ever in fact, but my hunch is that 70% of the list is emulating some form of terminal, e.g., a VT-100 or 102, or maybe something slightly more exotic. Or a shell program, as in America Online, which has its own standard.
If they are using terminal emulation they have only themselves to blame. [...]
-- Netcom doesn't give me a convenient way to bypass the dial-up terminal emulators (PPP and SLIP are no longer offered by Netcom)
The Internet Adapter ($25) http://marketplace.com/
-- Local Internet providers (ScruzNet, SenseMedia) are not, last I checked, offering e-mail. (Harry Bartholomew, of our list, has been looking into this and he tells me the best current strategy is to have two accounts: a SLIP or PPP provider for the Web, and ftp, etc., and a standard Netcom account for mail. I expect this to change, which is the thrust of my comments about the Web, but this is how things now change.)
The Internet Adapter ($25) http://marketplace.com/
-- The communication issue. What are _others_ using? I could certainly use my _graphics_ capabilities in the ways that Amanda and Perry are suggesting, and which I do all the time of course, but messages would still best be generated with an ASCII terminal environment as the intended destination. I note that all of Perry's messages, and most of Amanda's messages, fit this ASCII model.
I can't help but wondering how big of a part you play in this.
(The MIME stuff I'm not saying shouldn't be used, just that some of us--perhaps most of us, is my hunch--will not be adopting the latest bleeding edge technology. The comments here about Sun and Microsoft not properly--or at all--supporting MIME tell us that it's not real likely that most folks here will be sending spreadsheets out to the list readers and attaching GIFs anytime soon. No great loss, either.)
Not to the list, but to others -- over email.
Finally, Amanda mentioned "being away from out desks." Well, many of us are _always_ away from our desks when we post. From home machines, not from T3-connected Indigos on our desk.
DUO 230. Can't go to 14.4, because I am "too far from the switch." PacBell won't do anything about it. "All we guarantee is audible voice communication." ObPlug: Today we received the first two engineering samples of our new lan/phone/video devices that give you 16Mbps using the very same 4 phone wires that are already in your wall. At less than $100 per node. Call your congressman today and demand local telco deregulation :-)
And we're usually our own "mail support" staff: we have no one to turn to help us set up the latest-and-greatest (especially for a very minimal ROI).
I volunteer.
I am content to mainly communicate with most of you in the form of these ASCII messages. I've done a _lot_ of desktop publishing in my day, mostly for internal reports and conference papers, and I can't really say that the fancy fonts, graphs, multicolumn displays, etc, would have much effect on my ability to get my points across.
Agreed.
One thing I would like very much is the ability to include simple diagrams and drawings in my posts, but this is clearly an _unsolved_ problem, from a practical point of view. (Before any of you scream to me about how this can be done, ask yourself how many people could plausibly _see_ the results, given the realities of the Net today, and ask yourself where all these posts-with-diagrams are if they're so easy to do.)
Uhm, most people? -- Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.