lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (03/07/87)
Hi again. First, please allow me to clear up one point. UULINK can indeed send and receive netnews and provides the capability for MSDOS machines to become Usenet sites. It does not use Unix netnews software--rather, UULINK provides its own integrated user interface to both mail and netnews that is quite well suited to these sorts of systems. It's important to keep in mind, however, that just because a site CAN send/receive netnews to/from Usenet doesn't mean that it will. Many sites are not interested in netnews--they are primarily interested in UULINK's mail services. Some sites make use of netnews newsgroups to provide completely internal corporate discussion channels which are never seen by Usenet at large. The same goes for mail--many sites, while finding the ability to communicate with outside sites to be very important, make primary use of email for internal organizational communications between their own various machines. And if a small site does want to receive netnews from Usenet, it rarely presents a problem to the network at large. Few persons with small machines would want to take a full netnews feed; most small sites are interested in only a particular (usually fairly small volume) selection of newsgroups, often relating to technical topics of interest. By and large, most people mainly read netnews and only occasionally post articles--we can be sure there are many Usenet persons who have been on the network reading articles for years but who have never posted an article themselves. Overall, small sites can be integrated into the network quite cleanly. In fact, at many Usenet sites running Vax Unix systems (or other machines that would ordinarily be catagorized as "large" systems) there may only be one or two actual netnews users! These sites may actually be better catagorized as "small," even though the machines are large.... But here's the real crux of the matter: It isn't so much the number of sites that is important, but rather the BEHAVIOR of people at the sites. To the extent that people behave responsibly and treat the resource that is the network with respect, the network will remain a useful tool. It will continue to grow and evolve with that growth. Usenet has already evolved far beyond the expectations of its originators. There is no reason to expect nor desire that evolution to end now. --Lauren--