Perry Metzger writes:

Sorry, Tim, but this isn't true. I know people who still own VIC-20s that can't handle 80 columns. Also, users of ASR-33 teletypes might be left out by the requirement to handle full ASCII. I was using an ASR-33 full time only 15 years ago.

15 years ago, I was a 9 year old in the fifth grade who called the teacher a "nasty" name and was told to write 500 sentences as a reprimand. I asked if they could be typed, she said yes. So, I prompt;y went up to the 40 column display on the Apple IIe and wrote a four line, Apple Basic program that would repeatedly print 500 sentences saying, "It is not right to call the teacher names." When I handed it to her, she new she'd been set up. That didn't go over well as I remember. Anyway, that's not really what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that as a company that writes a Mail package. One of the biggest complaints of our customers has been lack of MIME support. Also, we have been severely "wrist slapped" for not formatting our mail messages to 80 characters so "normal people" could read it on their mail readers. So, my point, the market right now is for MIME support and user setting message widths. You can't please everyone all the time.

Now, I know that all usenet postings in Japan these days use ISO-2022 encoded characters, and MIME and all that, and that people in Russia use similar methods to carry their stuff, but they are just bounders.

Japanese characters are considerably different. I've been on some Japanese news servers that you just can't read with a normal news reader just because they require graphical Japanese characters. (Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana ... depends on the group.) By the way, I was testing a news reader, I can't read Kanji. -- Brad

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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>INTERNETWORKING THE DESKTOP<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Brad Shantz bshantz@spry.com Senior Software Engineer SPRY Inc. Direct #: (206)-442-8251 316 Occidental Ave. S. Main #: (206)-447-0300 Suite 316 Fax #: (206)-447-9008 Seattle, WA 98104 WWW URL: http://WWW.SPRY.COM

PGP Public Key at: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html Or email: pgp-public-keys@pgp.ai.mit.edu Subj: GET bshantz

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