Tim wrote:

It may be backward, but it is how a huge fraction of the list accesses the Net. Am I wrong on this? Dial-up access to local POPs is a fact of life for many, many people. Do a "who cypherpunks" on the list and look at the sites. Many will be dial-ups, others will be access to university machines, via dial-ups, etc. Others will be a mix of corporate machines, some with better connectivity than others, and many with proprietary e-mail systems, such as VAXMail and the like. My guess is that fewer than 20% of the list are directly SLIP- or PPP-connected, with good access to the tools praised here by Amanda, Perry, you, and others.

I have the same type of shell account with Netcom that you have. However, thanks to The Internet Adapter I turned that shell account into a SLIP connection. If you have a shell account, you can convert it into a SLIP account. It is as simple as that. Not that it mattered much for MIME email. Eudora can handle that via dial-up just as well. Sure helps for browsers, though. Accessing the web through Lynx is a joke. Even if you have image loading turned off in the browser to conserve bandwidth, _anything_ is better than Lynx.

It might be a good idea to get some real statistics on this. We did this a couple of years ago, and there was talk about doing it again.

For reasons I just addressed in another post, I foresee being on a dial-up (not a SLIP or PPP, that is) for a while. And I have relatively few complaints about it. My service provider keeps the 9446 current newsgroups, provides ftp and suchlike tools, and I don't have to be a sysadmin. Frankly, if I have to choose between not being able to see someone's MIMEd GIF and becoming a Unix sysadmin for my own site, I'll skip the GIFs.

Perhaps we can find some common ground here. You don't want to have to use UNIX. You like your Mac, don't you? So why interact with a lousy terminal server if you can do all the things you can do there - and more - the Mac way? Think about it. All the benefits of a Mac interface without giving up the benefits you get from Netcom. (No, I don't work for TIA. I am just a VERY satisfied customer.)

Even Perry admits to using emacs, and Unix mailers like elm are not exactly oxen. (I have a choice of several mailers, the usual ones. Big deal.) I also have commercial Eudora, the PowerMac version no less, so my offline mailer is adequate. This still doesn't mean non-ASCII (graphics, fancy fonts, equations) can be plausible placed in messages--and communicated to the list for reading/viewing.

Any of the mailers that you can use on a shell are oxen. Anything that can be used over a VT100 emulator is an oxen. (At least where non-ASCII display data is concerned).

I'd like to see some evidence that I am one of the last of my tribe.

Call me Ishi.

You are fighting a lost cause and you know it. VT100 is dead. No, you are not the last of your tribe. I should hope that you have the good sense to come around before that happens. All your friends here sure hope for it. -- Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.