12 May
1998
12 May
'98
1:47 p.m.
Zane H. Healy wrote:
If you have access to USENET the Amiga newsgroups are
some of the best left
(man has USENET gone down hill since I first started using it). Just
beware the euphoria is running extremally high with everyone waiting for
the big announcement from Amiga, Inc. at "World of Amiga" in London this
weekend. The hype is this announcement will change the face of computing,
PERIOD, and will feature some BIG names.
Hell, I was on the Usenet when it was just a partial feed from a
friend at Cal Tech to my little TRS-80 Model 16 two miles away
with its 15-Meg HD that could handle a month's worth of my partial
feed at a time (a full feed would have choked it in less than a
week -- if I could handle the bandwidth) at 1200 baud back in the
stone age (1986-7), when bang-path email could take a week or more
to turn around. Usenet was a bit surreal in those days of
_severely_ asynchronous communication (not the modems, just the
messages crossing paths). I loved it, and if the over-advertised
Internet keeps screwing up, 56Kbps modems (and 10-321 or whatever
the latest long distance cheap service is) would let us build a
better new Usenet than there used to be. And anybody who gave
the phone numbers to AOL, Hotmail, any such scum, or ever allowed
a binary file that wasn't uuencoded (and useful -- no hundred-part
fuzzy porn need apply) to go through would be flogged from all of
the L.sys or Systems files forever. Oh yeah, this would of course
be *nix based (Unix, Linux, Sunos, etc.) as the gods meant it to
be -- PCs are welcome only as terminal emulators if they're
hosting parasites such as Windows or MS-DOS.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_