essick (05/11/82)
#N:uiucdcs:10900001:000:1732
uiucdcs!essick May 11 15:51:00 1982
Responses to my query about how people read netnews have fi-
nally stopped coming in. As one would expect, at least one of every-
thing is being used on the net.
Baud rates seemd to be concentrated at 1200 and 9600. Those
two were roughly even with about 40% of the readers belonging to each.
The remainder tended to be 4800 baud. A smattering of the replies use
19.2 and 38.4. And a few people use 300 baud. Many of the 1200 baud
readers are on dial-ins.
I was interested in how many of the terminals were smart
enough to do cursor addressing and clearing screens, admittedly this
does not require too many smarts. More the 90% of those who replied
use a terminal that is at least that smart.
A limited number (only 2 replies) of people run the news
through lpr and read it later; the reasons included forwarding it to
people without access to a machine and vision problems.
The survey's intent was to see what sort of potential my
"notesfile" system would have across the network. "Notes" works best
on a cursor addressable CRT. We run almost all 9600 baud at Illinois
and have converted to "notes". Our copy of B news acts as a gateway
to the rest of the network; I'm not sure if anyone uses it for reading
news.
Information on the notesfile system can be had by mailing to
me at:
decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
I will send a copy of the "Notesfile Reference Manual" to anyone that
sends me a U.S. mail address. (It would save me money if I only had to
send 1 copy per site and someone would make any extra copies there).
Ray Essick decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
University of Illinois