larar@majestix.liu.se (Lars Aronsson) (02/12/90)
electronic mail, mailing lists, news, site-local bulletin board systems, talk, internet relay chat What other ways are there for communicating person to person via computers? And what kinds of programs are there to support the various ways? I use /usr/ucb/mail and nn on a Sun myself. Some major mailing lists are distributed as news groups (e.g. comp.risks), but are there otherwise (e.g. in the bitnet world) any programs above the level of mail(1) for reading mailing lists? What is the real difference between a mailimg list and a moderated news group? Are there site-local BBSes able of receiving news and mailing lists? Are site-local BBSes at all common on computers larger than PCs? I live in Europe, what is this thing called CompuServe? The reason for my questioning is that the TOPS 20 machines used until now for undergraduate training here at Linkoping University, Sweden, will be phased out this year and the mighty popular "KOM" BBS, which is coded in Macro 10 assembler, will not be portable to the new Sun SPARCstations. Therefore, we (students) are left with the following choices: 1) Stop communicating, this is out of the question 2) Read news with nn, but we'd prefer something more comfortable 3) Find an existing BBS software able to run under UNIX 4) Write our own software. Right now, 4 seems the most likely, with 2 as an intermediate. All input and ideas are welcome. Please, reply by mail to me and I will post a summary. Lars Aronsson, lar@ida.liu.se