John Higdon <john@zygot.ati.com> (04/28/91)
With the recent articles detailing the various horrors of online
services, one must conclude that there might be other ways of
accomplishing what these services provide. It really should not be
surprising that Prodigy, Genie, CompuServe, etc. have shortcomings and
limitations when you consider their design purpose and why they were
created.
If your desire is to communicate and share information with others
sharing a common, specialized interest, privately run BBSes should
fill the bill nicely. Many are now quite sophisticated with networking
and powerful software that serves the users quite well. And best of
all, they are free. Each issue of any free computer rag contains page
after page of BBS listings. And the rules of any given system are
generally much less Mickey Mouse than the pay services.
If you want non-interactive information, such as stock quotes,
national weather, etc., you might want to check out the various cable
channels. These are very convenient in that you do not have to login,
or do anything other than tune your TV to the correct channel. I have
just discovered The Weather Channel -- it is well done and quite
informative. It is also more accurate than the Ken and Barbie
weatherpeople on the local news.
If you want airline info and the ability to book reservations, you
might want to look at the online OAG. Actually there are online
specialty services for almost any activity. These are no-nonsense
services that provide a quality product.
For e-mail and international BBS-style boards, nothing beats UUCP and
the Internet. If you are an e-mail junkie, then get yourself a
software package that will do UUCP, find a sympathetic host, and go to
it. There are no online charges, no restrictions on what you can mail,
no restrictions on how much you can mail, in fact, few restrictions at
all. You can send and receive unlimited amounts of mail to and from
virtually anyone on any system that talks to the outside world. Usenet
provides discussion on every topic known to man and is read by people
all over the world. Except for the moderated groups (such as this
one), a person may post whatever and whenever he likes.
I am sure that I have missed many other examples of substitutes for
general purpose online operations, but you get the point. Years ago
when I discovered Usenet, CI$ went by the wayside. And even the
considerable cost of CompuServe was not the issue. The anarchistic
nature of Usenet is much more suitable for its purpose (diverse
discussion) than the restrictive "grade school style" rules that are
part of all the commercial services. While I recognize that there are,
for example, commercial interests that Prodigy must protect, that is
Prodigy's problem. We, as functional adults, would prefer to be
treated accordingly. I seriously doubt that the general purpose online
services are incapable of that accomodation.
John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395
john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !ggw@duke.cs.duke.edu> (05/01/91)
John Higdon wrote about using uucp and Usenet to take the place of the "high-cost" online services like GEnie and CI$ (I like that particular visual pun). While many (or even most) local BBSes or Usenet servers are "free", this is not always the case and it may get worse. UUnet and UUpsi and Portal and others are Usenet providers that charge (sometimes quite a bit) for feeding you Usenet and providing uucp connectivity. As of July 1st, add another one to the list. I was just informed by "mcnc" (formerly one of the "backbone cabal" sites) that to continue my uucp/usenet connectivity, it will cost me $200/month! Adding this insult to the recent injury of losing RTI as a newsfeeder in this region has the news readers of the are understandably confused. My site, for one, cannot afford to pay that kind of money for news, and it is unlikely that I will start charging for access (since that would allow GTE to change my computer line to a "business line" which I also cannot afford). The only hope is that I will find some friendly site at a local university (Hi Duke!) which will allow me to get the full feed from them that I currently get from mcnc. Since Duke is part of the MCNC run "CONCERT" subnet of SURAnet, they may not want to allow general public use of the resources that they pay for. If ISDN does get into the home, and "toasternet" ever gets made, it will only come about if some changes are made in the cost recovery algorithms used by the phone companies. Gregory G. Woodbury @ The Wolves Den UNIX, Durham NC UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw ...mcnc!wolves!ggw [use the maps!] Domain: ggw@cds.duke.edu ggw%wolves@mcnc.mcnc.org