lauren (02/22/83)
Greetings. Here is an "official" report on the current status of the major ARPANET digests and lists which feed into Usenet. Minimal traffic volume on some of these digests/lists has recently generated some concern on Usenet, so I'm hoping this message will help clear up the situation. The TELECOM digest is apparently alive and well. However, there have been essentially no submissions to the digest lately -- that's why it hasn't been appearing. SCIENCE-FICTION-LOVERS (SF-L), UNIX-WIZARDS, and TELETEXT are currently down. These digests/redistribution lists are all based on SRI-CSL, which only recently completed conversion to DoD TCP. There are still some problems with the mail system under the new protocols, and the "powers that be" do not want to reactivate these groups until mail is again solid on that machine, hopefully quite soon. One factor that has slowed progress is that CSL is a Tenex system, and there just aren't that many people working on TCP for Tenex these days (most of the effort has gone into TOPS-20, UNIX, and a few others.) In any case, there's no cause for panic -- the lists should be returning shortly. I'm told that there's a 200K+ byte backlog of SF-L digests ready for transmission as soon as CSL stabilizes. I might as well take this opportunity to mention that TELETEXT has been rather inactive lately (I moderate that list), but should be getting more active once CSL is back online for distribution. A new redistribution list (which I will also moderate) should also be appearing from CSL fairly soon. This new list, to be called VIDEOTECH, will cover all aspects of video technology, including hardware, graphics, satellite systems, broadcast technology, and related topics. A formal announcement will be made when this new list is ready to begin. Lastly, it appears that all UNIX Usenet gateway systems are fully operational, so once CSL again starts sending digests/lists, they should appear on Usenet without any difficulties. --Lauren--