ForthNet@willett.UUCP (ForthNet articles from GEnie) (01/02/90)
Hi all, I'm back from holiday vacation. There haven't been as many posts / mail messages about the GEnie/ForthNet <-> comp.lang.forth link as I thought there would be. Enclosed please find Gary Smith's reply to Marc de Groot / Peter de Silva. I'm holding off on forwarding the other materials (Forth hackers don't vacation!) from ForthNet till we get this cleared up. Or at least until I understand the politics better. Also note that I've changed the address from which this stuff will appear. Hopefully this will be the last time I do that. Re: the comment that you might punt all messages from 'willett'. I was hoping to avoid the necessity for that by creating a separate account from which to do only cross-posts. Although a novice forth programmer now, I hope that my posts will soon be about forth, rather than about this link, and would hate to be ignored ;-) because of the latter! -Doug --- Begin Message Forwarded from Gary Smith --- Category 14, Topic 6 Message 41 Mon Dec 25, 1989 GARY-S at 10:12 EST Marc de Groot writes: > Ditto. I get the feeling that Usenet is not being transmitted back to > GEnie. This effectively makes the GEnie articles the equivalent of > annoying crosstalk on telephone lines. If the connection is not > bi-directional it is not very good. > > I applaud the efforts of the person who's doing this -- your intentions > are obviously good. Please send me e-mail telling me who you are? Thanks. Wrong ! Marc (and Peter de Silva). Matter of fact, I was porting comp.lang. forth to GEnie and thus ForthNet several weeks before Doug Philips was kind enough to volunteer to close the loop and port replies back to Usenet. This was in response to requests that we port the ForthNet message base to Usenet by several subscribers to comp.lang.forth. If you had taken the time to read Tommy Rolfs' last OLIS newsletter or the very first Forthnet port to Usenet earlier this week you would already know who the principles in this are. OLIS even included a history of ForthNet and both the forementioned contained details of our efforts to provide a Forth archive at simtel.120 or some other such anon ftp site to support some of the 2000 Forth specific files available on GEnie and the CFB nodes of ForthNet. We anticipated there would be some problems. That is one reason these were so long in coming. I consulted with several (not just one or two) Sysgods before the first message was ever ported. Initially, Tommy was going to try to carry a digest of messages within OLIS, but his bandwidth is simply too restrictive and it seemed absurd to mail the digest to Ireland, where he is already confronted with limited disk space, for re-distribution. We knew all would not be sunshine and roses, but frankly I expected a far better reception than the sack-cloth and clinched fists that have greeted our efforts. The biggest problem seems to be addressing. There is no way to currently generate the reply field on GEnie and the CFB's. What we offer is messages from members of the Forth community like Robert Berkey, Dennis Ruffer, Jerry Shifrin and others that do not have ready access to Usenet and the previously mentioned 2000 file archive (and growing). Rather than the brickbats and catcalls, what I (we) would appreciate is constructive comment to help integrate this effort where we are meeting a mutual need. Some on Usenet are already replying to ForthNet comments, and some on ForthNet are addressing comments to specific persons and messages. This seems to be the right direction. If any of you on Usenet comp.lang.forth care to comment I strongly urge you to do so. I would prefer helpful suggestions rather than the caustic barbs, but that decision rests with the sender. Marc, you know me. Others may not. I am Gary Smith, co-SysOp on the GEnie Forth RoundTable and co-SysOp on the GEnie Unix RoundTable and fairwitness on wet nixpub forth.cf. You can address comments directly here in news or to my home site (you will have to bang all the way, I'm not in many maps): from uunet ... swbat!texbell!ark!lrark!glsrk!gars I can also be reached via uucp at... chinet, wet, well, and lrark ie: gars@wet.uucp Needless to say, I can also be reached on GEnie. GARY-S or GARS The gentleman porting these (AGAIN) is Doug Philips. sei!willett!dwp [if that doesn't work, try: uunet!willett!dwp -Doug] but I ask that you do not kill the messenger. Save your best shots for me, I am one of the primary movers behind ForthNet. Gary texbell!ark!lrark!glsrk!gars personal ps: Marc - did you get my latest note regarding compilation problems with your cforth ? I have not received a reply. FYI, the 3b1 does not have a syscall, but does support exec. gars --- End Message Forwarded from Gary Smith --- ----- This message came from GEnie via willett through a semi-automated program. Report problems to: 'uunet!willett!dwp' or 'willett!dwp@gateway.sei.cmu.edu'