[comp.sys.next] Assorted: New NeXT and RTF and comp.sys.next

jack@cbrown.claremont.edu (12/13/90)

Hi.  

For those people keeping track I finally got my NeXTstation.  It was ordered in
October so the shipping time is a little better than a Mac Classic.  The box
really cooks (faster than the VAXStation I'm writing this on).  It's about half
way up (our Network manager is at DECUS).  So I am hoping to bring it up to
speed by sometime next week.

On a different note I wanted to chip in my $0.02 on comp.sys.next and RTF.

There are a lot of reasons why I think that a comp.sys.next.rtf is not viable
AT-THIS-TIME.  Briefly, it has to do with current network bandwidth, disk space
at many newsites, and readablity by non-next users (I will be more than happy
to expand on this via E-Mail --- I think that most of the issues have been
touched upon in previous postings).

But I think the idea is really good.  Multi-media E-mail will become a buzz
word in the 90's (so will Electronic Document Interchange --- trust me, they're
different).  And it would be neat to have NeXT be the first system to lead this
revolution.  So this is my idea, why not setup a comp.sys.next.rtf mailing list
and have a gateway that interchanges messages between comp.sys.next and the
mailing list?  The code translating from RTF to ASCII and ASCII to RTF would
not be too difficult.  Of course any site that had more than one NeXT, or more
than one person reading the mailing list --- would be foolish not to pipe the
mailing back into a local comp.sys.next.rtf hence making a newsreader that
could read RTF relatively valuable.

So how about it?  Any volunteers?  I reckon that you would probably only need
20-40 megs of diskspace free, depending on how far back that you wanted to
archive.  Any listserv's (or other automated mailing list programs) written for
the NeXT?

Comments?  Should we just bypass this idea and go straight to
comp.sys.next.rtf?  And take this discussion news.groups, trail.newgroups and
news.announce.newgroups?

---Jack

Jack Stewart        		Jack@Hmcvax 		  (Bitnet)
User Support Coordinator,       jack@hmcvax.claremont.edu (Internet)
Harvey Mudd College,            jack@134.173.4.32         (also Internet)
Claremont, Ca. 91711            714-621-8006