comparc@twwells.uucp (comp.archives) (06/05/89)
I received this in response to a query I sent out to a number of
people who were said to have archives; I had been waiting for some
additional information but this is too good to hold on to any
longer.
The person who wrote the appended message is Jamie Watson, jw@pan;
for more information, you should send him e-mail.
Note that he provides his service *only* in Europe. Please do not
bother him if you are in the USA. (Though I do wonder what he'd do
with a request from, say, New Zealand? :-)
---
Bill
{ uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill
send comp.archives postings to twwells!comp-archives
send comp.archives related mail to twwells!comp-archives-request
---
I am doing something which you might consider archiving; I will explain
what it is, and you can decide for yourself. If you want to list this
in your archive directory, feel free.
I offer distribution of X Window System tapes anywhere in Europe. The
tapes are available in two formats, QIC-24 (as in Sun, IBM RT/PC, NCR
Tower, etc) and TK-50/TK-70 (as in DEC MicroVax and Vaxstation). The
tapes contain an identical copy of the latest MIT X distribution (V11R3
at the moment); I am very careful about the copy, going so far as to
use 'dd' to get it off the MIT tape and onto my tapes, so I don't risk
screwing anything up in extracting and rewriting the tar archives. The
tapes contain several other things of interest related to X; the complete
contents of the tape are:
- MIT core distribution
- MIT contributed tape 1
- MIT contributed tape 2
- All Official Patches from MIT, plus numerous "unofficial" patches
that have been posted to bring up V11R3 on DecSystems, Apollo,
and others.
- Purdue Speedups
- The latest draft ICCCM document
- All articles form comp.sources.x
- Directory listings of all of the above
- Sources for public domain patch and compress utilities
- Source for public domain tar (John Gilmore's version)
The terms of the distribution are quite simple. No payment or advance
sending of tapes is required. Anyone in Europe can have a copy; all
they have to do is agree to send back the tape, or an equivalent blank
cartridge if they want to keep the original. I pay the postage to send
the tape, they have to pay the postage to get it back to me. (Believe
it or not, one jerk sent back the tape via DHL, *freight collect*. I
guess one jerk out of 85 tapes sent so far is not bad).
There you have it. Oh, people outside Europe needn't ask for a tape,
because I will not send one. The idea here is that *very* few people
in Europe have ftp access, so it is not easy to get the distribution.
MIT will accept only checks in U.S. dollars, drawn on a U.S. bank, for
tape distribution, and for a lot of people over here getting such a
check is a significant amount of trouble.
jw