wab (04/13/83)
Is there a state newsgroup for Washington? I know that New Jersey and Oregon have one, but I haven't heard of such an animal for the Evergreen State. Would I be able to subscribe to such a newsgroup in Oregon? Bill Baker !teklabs!reed!wab
furuta (04/17/83)
No, I don't think that there is a State of Washington newsgroup. In fact, I don't think there are any net sites in Washington outside of the Seattle metropolitan area. I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to set one up but since there hasn't been any apparent large demand for it, it doesn't seem particularly necessary. We do have a local University of Washington Computer Science department group (uw.all) and one for a set of companies which participate in what is known as the University of Washington Computer Science Associates program (uwcsa.all), all of which aren't in Washington, of course. This administrative partitioning of groups (as opposed to geographic partitioning) has seemed to meet our local needs in the Computer Science Department. How active is Oregon's newsgroup? Does the amount of traffic on it justify its existence? I suppose it might make sense to create a Pacific Northwest group. If you look at your graphical Usenet map, graciously provided by Dan Lorenzini, you'll notice an interesting phenomenon. There are tons of news connections between California and Oregon and between Washington and the East Coast but none between Washington and Oregon (and indeed none between Portland and Corvallis within Oregon). [Hmmm, I just noticed that Seattle is on the wrong side of Puget Sound, too.] All that this shows is that inter-state calling is frequently cheaper than intra-state calling and that one is often more likely to be able to arrange connections which follow corporate rather than geographic lines. --Rick ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!furuta (uucp) ...ucbvax!lbl-csam!uw-beaver!furuta or Furuta@Washington (ARPAnet)