bstempleton (08/22/82)
I suddenly see today the creation of a group called net.micro.pc to talk not about personal computers, but rather the IBM one. First of all, although I am all for talk about the IBM personal computer, this group is a tremendous waste of resources. I see it is coming through about six sites on the uucp net to get to the site where somebody is sending it out on the usenet in a group I never recall being discussed. Since sites sdcsvax, philabs, cmcl2, floyd, eagle, mhuxt and mhuxa are all shipping this stuff to you from the arpanet, Mr. Glenn W., did you ask them if they wanted to take on this rather heavy load of shipping all that material twice? Please, the distribution of this sort of stuff should be done at the Arpanet interface, so resources and people's private money are not wasted absolutely needlessly. It's people who do things like this that will mean the undoing of this net, unfortunately. Since you have arranged this as a net. group, the correct way of getting something in it should be with inews, but there is no explained way to post to this group. If you are going to forward a digest, you should get it done by an arpanet link. If it is coming in digest form and the correct way to enter an article is my mail, you make it an fa. group and you set the reply string to point to the correct mailing address for the digest. If you want to have a distributed discussion, that is a net. group, and you need a special two way forwarding scheme such as that used by Andy Knutsen at SRI-UNIX. What we don't want is the cluttered mess that is going on here. Finally, although much less important, I wish IBM PC users would quit referring to their computer as the "PC", which means personal computer. PC is a generic term, and not a trade mark. Even IBM won't be able to change that. Calling the IBM-PC the "PC" anywhere outside IBM itself is like calling a Sony TV the "TV". PC is not the trade marked brand name in this case, IBM is. So call it the IBM-PC or just the IBM if you know you are in a micro context. And please don't name the group net.micro.pc, because somebody will get confused. Sorry to complain so much, but this is a real waste. Please get your act together before you spend a lot of other people's money.