Overpricing (was: Re: [SunRescue] Looking for disk array, was: needNT-1

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

bobkeys at weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu writes:

>Nothing is as slow as reading the netnews on an ASR33....!

>Real diehards cut the netnews to a paper tape, overnight, spooled it,
>and read it the next day!

>(Whew!  It has been 18 years since I last read the netnews that way,
>        thank heavens!)

This is getting pretty close to a Monty Python skit, *but*...

There was a period around 1990 or so when I was having a really hard
time getting internet/usenet access, having no university connections,
etc. I had a UUCP connection, but it was a long distance call, so
I just polled nightly and couldn't afford to have usenet coming in 
that way.

I finally got a "telnet account" for cheap, from some company that
was assuming all their customers had accounts on other machines 
somewhere on the net.

I read news for a couple of months by speaking raw nntp to their news
server, by hand. I didn't post that way, I captured a log of the entire
telnet session, edited up any reply I wanted to post, and sent it down
my uucp connection.

(Yes, eventually I hacked up a little utility to grab stuff in batches
this way.)

I think my home box was a 3B2/300 then.

--- david fischer --- dave at cca.org --- www.cca.org -----------------------
----------------------- I took one sample and interpolated from there. ---