[Info-vax] Real Usenet clients, was: Re: backups and compaction or nocompaction might be better

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <kee4n5$oig$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> > I learned to type on a manually powered typewriter which would hit the
> > end of the carriage and overstrike and any additional keystrokes!

I learned on a semi-electric (electric keys, but manual carriage return 
and line feed).

> But have you moved on from those old manual typewriters, maybe to an 
> electric typewriter, and probably from now to a computer?   

yes i hav sir but normally i write in the oldskool style because it is 
easier to read and gives U the impression that i have some minimal 
standard of education but of course if it is 2hard4u then dont bother as 
im sure some fancy cloud computing stuff can decode ur linez

> Hopefully 
> not using paper for reading postings, and hopefully you've avoided the 
> generations of printing terminals that were around.  (Or have you 
> connected that old manual typewriter into an nntpd net news server 
> directly somehow?  That'd be an interesting hack.  News postings 
> arriving, and clattering away as they're printed.  :-)

There is an expression: Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  Yes,
technical progress is good, but that is no reason to break with
tradition if those traditions are good, in particular if they are better
than the new stuff.  I remember reading an interview with Thomas Dolby
20 years or so ago (i.e. he was interviewed and I read the interview; I
didn't read with him) in which he said something like "In the future,
maybe you can see some old geezer with long hair and a shiny guitar in a 
small club, but most music will be like this", meaning his music.  Like 
the cars of the 1940s, this futuristic stuff became dated more quickly 
than is normally the case.  Blinded by science indeed!  I recently read 
that he now writes ring tones for Nokia (no joke!) and the Stones are 
still a big draw, Led Zeppelin gets great reviews for Celebration Day 
etc.  Go figure.  Has any music dated more quickly than the
over-produced 1980s stuff with too much echo on the drums back when even 
Joni Mitchell had a Fairlight?

> If you're using a computer now, then that can perform some amazing 
> feats, depending on what software is loaded into it.  Some computers 
> can even decode MIME headers, and can wrap text to the particular width 
> you prefer to use, and can even display characters that weren't 
> available on those old manual typewriters provided.   And unlike the 
> old typewriters, computer software can be updated.

Yes, but this is often unnecessary.  Why burn the cycles just BECAUSE 
YOU CAN?  There is simply no point in being fancy in a text-based 
newsgroup.

> ————

Err, right.