-=> Rick Christian wrote to Tony Langdon <=-

 RC> Like I said things have been lost in time on exactly why, but a lot of
 RC> had to do with FD just making sense to me.

I think in my case, it was a case of Bink being the first one I got going. 
From memory, it was free (as in beer), wasn't FD shareware?  Secondly, I
started playing with Bink and it made sense to me, so I kept using it.  And
today, it's all come back to me with binkd. 


 TL>> especially in the earlier days, when I was running 2400 bps.  Was
 TL>> interesting seeing bot RxD and Txd lights on continuously. 

 RC> My biggest issue back in the day was HST and HST+ crap. I never had any
 RC> success
 RC>  with HST/+ nodes ever negotiating down, and personally I think they
 RC> were set that way.

I don't remember that issue.

 RC> I had a V.Evertyhing eventually when I got it cheapo... but I think it
 RC> got lost
 RC>  in one of the many moves later after modems were not in need, other
 RC> than ICLID
 RC>  or fax.

When I had the BBS, I only got up to 2400, but when a friend took over hosting
it, he did eventually upgrade to Courier V.Everything modems.  Had no issues.  

 RC> If I ever get the chance I might dig through the shed and toes.. there
 RC> should be some Telebits in there too!

 RC> Wasn't there something that allowed for that, like Hydra??? Or
 RC> something. I remember having some bidirectional protocols available for
 RC> things, but maybe that was stuff I added to Terminate, Telemat, and
 RC> ProComm...

Hydra rins a bell.  In any case, it was a cool feature of Bink, especially at
slower modem speeds or for large volumes of mail.

 TL> My transfers were local, but they were fairly large for the day, so
 TL> the bidirectional protocol was a huge time saver.  I'v be like "Cool,
 TL> this system runs Bink, or "Damn, it's FD, slower transfers! 

 RC> My reaction was like that for HST nodes, as per above, I really thing
 RC> they were
 RC>  intentionaly misconfigured to block the V.34 etc stuff at the time.

I'm not sure how much that was an issue over here.

 RC> I used NetMGR too! Had it to do all kinds of things, and one of those
 RC> was to take the stuff that came in for some things like ML's I was
 RC> operating that went
 RC>  in/out via private FTN's. I think I saw a Linux port of this in
 RC> collecting old
 RC>  things for Fido for Linux.

Hmm, a Linux port of NetMgr.  Might have to look for that. 

 RC> Me either, C just didn't work for me. Considering I started on COBOL,
 RC> Fortran, and assembler for a PDP8/e and later 6502, 68HC11's, and some
 RC> other stuff.

I programmed in BASIC, Pascal (generally Turbo Pascal), and various assembly
languages, including 8080, 8086, 6809, and even PIC16F84.

 RC> GIGO really would need to be able to work with a standard UseNet
 RC> account now to
 RC>  gate UseNet vesus uucp. There are not too many if any uucp places
 RC> around. I susppose some the ancicent "freenet" things that are still
 RC> around might offer it.

I know it was possible to use an SMTP server under OS/2 (there was one that
worked with GIGO), and I even managed to get GIGO to work with an old version
of MDaemon under 32 bit Windows (I was running NT 4 at the time).  I can't
recall if I was still gating Usenet at the time, or if it was just email
(including gated maiing lists).  I know I had to convert from UUCP to SPTP (and
NNTP?) when my ISP stopped offering UUCP.

 TL> Sounds like all of my todo lists. 

 RC> The ones at work shrink, but just keep filling up. The ones for my
 RC> personal stuff never seem to shrink, but only grow and grow and grow.
 RC> Hmmmm....

Know that feeling. 


... People forget how fast you did a job just how well you did it.
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