mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (01/25/84)
(This discussion belongs in net.news, not net.news.adm, so I'm moving it there.) If you do it with a 900 number, you either have to have zillions of modems and ports (since 103 and 212 are in fact two way protocols) or use some funny way to hook up a broadcaster to every line and have the 212 think it's listening but it isn't. The cable idea is intriguing. The main thing that worries me is that not all receivers will be listening 24 hours per day, so if it's only a one-way broadcast mechanism, you have to repeat everything over and over and have the local machine listen through the cycle of "new news" and decide what it's already seen. No human would put up with the "cycle through everything at 30 seconds per frame" user interface I currently see on my cable. It has to be full speed and use some smarts in the users computer. The period for broadcasting is also unclear. Do you broadcast everything seen today all day and then start from scratch tomorrow? Expire things after 24 hours? What do you do when somebody goes away for a week or his machine breaks? Perhaps have certain times of day when "back issues" are broadcast?