jeffj@uunet.uu.net (Jeff Jonas) (05/24/90)
NYNEX has an information gateway service. It's essentially a dataswitch. There are numbers in area codes 212, 718, 516 and 914. It's made very clear that the providers are NOT associated with NYNEX, that NYNEX only provides the access and the dataswitch help menus (which include a directory of services). 1) Has this been tried elsewhere? (I recall some slight mention of other failures of similar programs). 2) The directions state: "If you have a party line, your connection can be interrupted by another party's incoming or outgoing calls". I thought that modems were forbidden on party lines. 3) Why would someone have a group with this as opposed to say, Compuserve or Genie? Its only advantages could be keeping things regional (NY only) or low cost. You login with your New York Telephone calling card number. It shows up on your phone bill under the "Data services" heading. It's like 900 numbers for your computer. Each service charges by the minute, and shows up on your phone bill. 800-338-2720 is the customer service number. Free software is provided (for Mac or PCs). It emulates a vt100, and handles videotext (minitel and Alex). It's configurable much like Procomm (modem initialization, prefix, suffix, wait charcter, ...) so it should work with non Hayes compatible modems (quite unlike the Prodigy software). I tried it a few times, but I prefer USENET for now. I don't need computer chat lines, and there are NO technical forums. Phone switches used to be wired, now they're wierd. :) Jeffrey Jonas jeffj@synsys.UUCP