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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-01-31 18:25:53 +0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply said:

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

I'm sad that you think that, Phillip.   Really I am.

Hopefully you can keep your chosen hardware and software going for as 
long as you need it to work, too.

I used VMS as my desktop for ~25 years, starting on terminals and all 
the way through some then-very-nice Alpha workstations.   Great boxes 
for many of those years, too.  I started to look at how much time and 
effort I was expending to stay with that choice, and at what the trend 
for that looked like, at what the comparable tools were capable of, and 
(eventually) asked myself if the hardware and software I was using 
still served me, or if I was spending more time serving the gear as 
compared with what else was available.

Can you continue to run VMS as a desktop?  Sure.  Can you use an 
ASCII-only news reader?  Sure.

Everybody has different requirements, and makes different choices.

Just don't expect the rest fo the world to maintain compatibility with 
the older gear.

> 
>> 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.


Alas, the world has moved on from ASCII some time ago, though you'll 
still be able read a subset of UTF-8 for a while.


> 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?

There are folks that are fond of vinyl and even 78s around, and working 
Victrolas, too.

> 
>> 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.

You don't need to justify your choice of tools to me.  I'm sure they 
work well for you.

> 
>> ————
> 
> Err, right.

Your news reader can't decode UTF-8.  There's inevitably going to be 
much more of that encoding getting posted around the net, too.



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