werner@ut-ngp.UUCP (Werner Uhrig) (01/20/86)
I succeeded to reach Rich Alderman (alias INFO-MAC-REQUEST@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA) by phone this afternoon, and he indicated that he would start "moderating" the accumulated messages *TONIGHT* again. He indicated that this should mean a veritable flood of messages over the next few days (which will appear in the news-group "mod.computers.macintosh" shortly thereafter, I suspect). I won't repeat his explanation for the 2 months of silence as I don't think I understood very well why he was unable to, at least, send out a notice, explaining the problem, or answer the many queries and offers of assistence that were sent to him. I have hopes he will explain this himself in his first message, and I expect that a lively discussion will follow, to find ways to avoid a situation where a group will simply "disappear" for such an extended time without any way of communicating with the rest of the group. When I think of those ARPAnetters, that do not have alternative sources of information like USENET, MAUG or DELPHI, I doubt I can overestimate their level of frustration by now. Reminds me a little of the frustration we experienced nearly 2 years ago when we wanted to gateway INFO-MAC from ARPA to USENET and vice-versa, and on USENET our request for a seperate news-group was rejected, and we had to "conspire" to simply flood net.micro with forwarded articles about Macintosh topics to get net.micro.mac started and "justified". And the idea to port net.micro.mac back to the ARPA-group INFO-MAC was "denied" due to the prevailing opinion that nothing of value was expected from USENET among "all that juvenile junk".... And how some of us forwarded articles manually and piece-meal to INFO-MAC to demonstrate otherwise. Maybe a better set-up will result from all this recent trouble on ARPA, one which will make such "black-outs" and extended period of "silence" less likely, if not impossible (after all, those folks developing all that reliable StarWars-software all live on ARPA ...) ---Werner "yes, I'm somewhat frustrated"
shulman@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Jeff Shulman) (01/21/86)
I would like to point out that I my Delphi and Usenet digests will be made available to Arpanetters (there should be an announcement in one of the new INFO-MACs.) So, by posting a message to Usenet, you are also reaching the Arpa community via my Usenet digests (which are also sent to Delphi.) INFO-MAC is also forwarded to Delphi (yes, I'm a busy man.) Jeff P.S. On a more personal note, watch for FontDisplay 3.0 coming to a net.sources.mac machine near you "Real Soon Now" (its in beta.)