Tim wrote:

I really do feel we're on the edge of chaos here. Every day that passes I get more junk mail, more MIME mail, more > 80 column mail, etc. Yes, the solution is for me to either filter this junk out or to jump out out to the bleeding edge myself.

Re-reading the above paragraph, you know that in the long tern there is only one answer.

But many people won't. We risk losing our lingua franca in a transition to chaos.

There are a lot of new tools out there. Some will survive the test of time, others won't. But if anything, there is less chaos today than there was two years ago. Two years ago, nobody used URLs. They typically described the location of a file as such: "You can get the file at ftp foo.bar.com, its in the pub/mac directory, I think it's called wonder.sit." So you hit ^Z to get out of tin, type ncftp, type all the stuff above, hope it is right - it probably isn't - find the file, get it, type "quit", type sz wonder.sit, get up to fetch a cup of coffee instead of just sitting there and staring at the screen while the file is being transfered to your machine, drink the coffee, ten minutes later you type "fg". Back to tin. Neato, isn't it? Today, most posters on USENET have learned to use URLs and it has become easier to do so, because more and more programs supports them. This is how the above exchange works today: I read my news with Newswatcher. Someone mentions the new hot piece of software at ftp://foo.bar.com/pub/mac/wonder.sit. I option-click anywhere on the URL. Newswatcher passes it to Anarchie for retrieval in the background. I read the next post. I say, burn all the VT52 terminals of this world to fuel the fire of progress. Toss the 2400 bps modems in there, too. I know that few folks will feel sad over the long overdue end of the ASCII era. I can, of the top of my head, name five friends with computers who, after seeing the VT100 display of a shell account, refused to have anything to do with the Internet. "You got be joking. I am not dealing with *this*." Now years later and after much evangelizing and MacWeb demonstrations, they are finally begining to show interest. The dialog was always the same: "I won't have to do any work in one of those terminal windows, will I?" -- "I promise, you won't." -- "Good, because I hate this ASCII garbage." It typically takes me 1-2 hours to install and configure everything on their machines. Yes, it is true, I have spent many hundered hours obtaining the knowlege in the first place, but I am willing to share my knowledge with anyone who asks. As for my friends, they all have been very happy with their new tools. None of them has so far expressed any interest in the telnet client that I have included. Happy netting, -- Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.