mark lewis wrote to James Digriz:

<cut much useful info>

ml> 
ml> in today's world, the mailers operate, mostly, on their own port (24554 
ml> default for binkp) and so there's no real need for the old style front end 
ml> mailer sharing the same port as the BBS... it can still be done, though... 
ml> i do it here with my frontdoor/remoteaccess setup running on OS/2... there 
ml> are not very many systems out there doing this so there's not much mail 
ml> being transferred over telnet mailer connections... the majority of 
ml> today's systems are using binkd or have a mailer that offers the binkp 
ml> protocol...
ml> 
ml> i don't know if that answers your question(s) or not... hopefully it does 
ml> help some...
ml> 
ml> )\/(ark

Right, and I'm familiar with most of that. I remember for instance making a TI
S1500 (an old SVR3.3 32-bit Unix system without the available ethernet card)
accessible via telnet 15-20 years ago or so. So I'm not a stranger at that 
sort
 of thing. It's not too hard to make a strictly digital connection of some
kind, or to convert IP to serial connections. 

You can fake dial-up, too. On the retro 4.3BSD UUCP network that Warren Toomey
of tuhs.org set up, we've used his tcpdial perl script for this. You could use
a flatfile like a nodelist for this, or use a distributed or shared database.  

I probably wasn't clear enough, though.  The problem I'm looking at is  going
from serial 
connections to analog and back, on both ends, over the PSTN, when there is no
copper, analog, or TDM. Where there is no POTS, only fiber, only IP data
networking underlying everything. It's not clear to me that such use of voice
phone lines will be univerally available. With or without the "repeal" of "Net
Neutrality", the economics appear to disencentive support for analog data. 

Why would you still want to do this? Well, consider that the 2015 FCC decision
exempted dial-up ISPs (or BBS'es, if you stretch things, especially if they
route outside their local network) from the Net Neutrality regulations, some 
of
 which were both onerous, and offensive to 1st amendment sensibilities. May or
may not be a moot point now, but it could come up again easily enough. 

Beyond that, analog is still a good choice for some applications and some
media. 

                                   
                                                                               
                                                                               
                                                                              

    Greetings, James Digriz
    email: jbdigriz@bbs.dragonsweb.org

--- MBSE BBS v1.0.7.4 (GNU/Linux-x86_64)
 * Origin: DragonsWeb Labs  (1:123/755)