doug@biglake.uucp (Doug Eastick) (02/25/88)
Not so long ago, there was only one "big" uucp program around. By "big" I mean, widely used. It was UUPC, written by some great Canadians (aren't we all :-)). I wanted to try to get my PC to UUCP to a machine at work and pick up some mail. So I ftp'd INTERIM.ARC from SIMTEL20, and tried the .EXE's on my computer (a Gentek PC with a v20, and 2 floppy drives). What did it do? It locked it up. Bummer, I'll have to recomile it. So I recompiled the C programs into new executables. Mail now works, but UUIO doesn't. Some people may remember my letter in the fall about not being able to get the g-protocol started. UUIO just sat there and never caught the ^PShere sent out by the UNIX machine. So I let UUPC collect dust for a few months. February comes around and UFGATE is the hot new program. Woowee, gotta try this one. Ftp to SIMTEL20, nothing; other popular machines, nothing. Finally I found it on grape.ecs.clarkson.edu. The docs say "you need a hard disk". But I think it might work on 2 floppies with some organization. It does, kind-of. The UUSLAVE works fine (can't say if I've noticed any bad xfer rates), but I still need some kind of Fido or Opus thing. Can I find one of those easily?? Not in 2 hours of looking on Toronto BBS's and various Internet machines in the states (Perhaps I'm just a lazy searcher). Anyway I came to the assumption that the Fido/Opus stuff will fill my 2 floppies and I'm screwed. Back with UUPC, I realise that COMM.OBJ (which came in INTERIM.ARC) was linked in with my .OBJ files. Could this be the culprit? Yes. I recompiled COMM.ASM with the new Turbo Assembler from Borland, and re-linked the OBJ's into the two binaries MAIL and UUIO. Life is now wonderful. Which do I like? I like uupc only because it resembles a UNIX utility more than UFGATE does (I prefer the UNIX concept to MSDOS; don't ask what that means). I would like to complement the authors of UFGATE for their great job of producing a full-blown USENET package for MS-DOS, as well as a hefty manual. But, since I've *never* had any Fido background, I guess I'd rather stay in a UUCP realm rather than a UUCP+FIDO realm. Has anybody got a minor little tool/program to break up news batches from UUPC into articles? An "rnews" for the PC perhaps. What's the status of the next UUPC version? -- Doug Eastick <biglake!doug@me.utoronto.ca> or <biglake!doug@me.toronto.edu>