The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Getting Answers Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

At Melb PC, you could attend a monthly meeting and ask a question during Random Access. With an audience of 300-400 members you will be lucky to get the best answer on the night. If you are luckier, someone will read the printed question in this magazine and submit a reply for publication next month. Another approach is to post the question on the club's bulletin board system (BBS). If the question is placed in an "echomail area" (where messages are relayed to all parts of the world) you have a better chance of getting a reply. Some echomail areas are indeed very good, as they are monitored by knowledgeable people who take the time to reply in detail. I use the collective term "echomail" in preference to Fidonet, as the latter has been supplemented with other "xxxnets", who would all have to be named individually to be fair. 

Unfortunately, the echomail community has been beset with factional politics, as it is a voluntary system where the costs of operation are borne by each sysop. Depending on the allegiance of your sysop, you get only those echomail areas that are being carried by your faction. International echomail is brought into the country by keen sysops in Sydney, Brisbane and elsewhere. They own high speed modems that cost around $2000 and make the overseas calls themselves. They then allow "poorer" BBSs to call their machines and take what they want. We in Melbourne are dependent on those "rich" local BBSs that can afford to call Sydney or Brisbane. Your board may not even do that-it may only call a local board and take what's left. Your sysop is not necessarily to blame - he is often at the bottom of the local hierarchy, and not in a position to choose sides. Another problem lies with the software used to operate the BBS and the inter-BBS communications. It is truly a group effort, as many people write the programs, often to solve a local problem. Often there are several programs available to do a given task, so the risk of incompatibility increases. 

Anyway, this paper is not designed to analyse what is right or wrong about Melb PC's BBS. I have given up on the echomail community, not because of perceived problems with our own BBS but because most of the problems are outside our control. A major problem is the limitation of MS/PC-DOS and the fact that multitasking is not easy under this DOS. 

I want to discuss USENET, the international system that is more widespread, but is largely confined to mainframes and large multiuser systems. I believe it has many advantages:

Quality of Content You have read the so-called "Unix Newsgroups" that I print regularly. They are the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of newsgroups in USENET, covering topics ranging from science, medicine, computing, recreation, military, humour, music, arts ... down to bizarre, kinky topics that can't be elaborated
upon. The newsgroups relevant to MS-DOS users alone would be around 20. In Australia we get a fraction of what is available in North America, but unless you spend all day reading news-groups you will not be able to read all that is available. 

As most USENET users are at universities and corporations, the idiot factor is rare. You won't see the teenage chatter that is prevalent on the echomail level, even in the so-called sysop areas. Then again, you will see the occasional adult "flame session" that keeps others entertained or disgusted. 

Some newsgroups are "moderated" just as in echomail, to keep discussions under control, and to filter out matter that is technically wrong. An example is comp. binaries.ibm.pc, where programs are made available for all to take, but in the form of an ASCII message that has to be converted back to binary. The moderator ensures that only high quality programs are released. Some newsgroups relate to non-computer subjects, so other members of your family may also find USENET interesting. 

The main attraction is that the big American computer companies are on USENET, so if your question pertains to software, you can expect a response from people at Microsoft, Adobe, Adaptec, Apple, Borland, etc (depending on the topic). The hardware companies are also there - DEC, Unisys, Dell, HP, Sun, etc. Your chances of getting an accurate answer are high. Some 200,000 computers are on the net, with an unknown number of end users, so you will get several replies. Microsoft in particular is very sensitive to bug reports, and regularly announces that a free patch disk is available if you ring a certain number. If you use Microsoft C 5.1 (early releases) and have never obtained a patch disk, you should be getting worried.

Mail 

You also get the facility to send messages to any person on the net, and to people on commercial networks such as CompuServe. Earlier I spoke of the newsgroups, which are really mail messages that are seen by everyone. When you post a message in a newsgroup you may not get all replies in that mode. Most replies will reach you as private electronic mail. If your query is likely to be of widespread interest, you should collate and summarise the replies and post a follow-up message to the newsgroup. 

Some mail remains private. For example, I have friends from my university days in NZ who are now scattered all over the globe, but who are on the net. I send them electronic mail, as they find it easier to type out a few lines at their desk than to sit down, write, and send a conventional letter through the post.

Repository of Files 

I have free access to the gigabytes of programs stored on SIMTEL20 (an Army mainframe in New Mexico), and so does everyone else on USENET. If I want a program I just ask for it through a rather cumbersome process that takes about a week to complete. The programs on SIMTEL20 are sometimes a little dated compared with our BBS, but there are many obscure ones that I may never see locally. There are hundreds of similar archives elsewhere, including Melbourne, so I look in a local archive first. As I am not connected to the Internet I cannot use a system called " FTP", which enables you to connect with a distant computer as if you are a local user and then you may download what you want. 

I use a system known as a list server, which means I send a command to a machine to send me a file in the form of mail. Few archive sites overseas have this facility, so I have to ask friends at universities to get me something via FTP Adobe has such a server, and they have volumes of PostScript-related programs and specifications available for free downloading. This may go against the grain of our PD library, but a USENET user rarely has to pay for a PD or shareware program. If what he wants is not on an archive, he merely posts a "Wanted" request and someone will send it to him. There will always be software that will not be available on USENET. 

I feel tempted to comment on the article "Another Offering" elsewhere in this issue, as Norma referred to the cost of obtaining programs from PC MAGNET. All the PC Magazine Utilities going back to Volume 6 and the latest ones (about six issues of what has reached Australia) are available on SIMTEL20. The listings of programs in almost every US computer magazine you can think of are also available. Some indexes to popular magazines are also available.

Cost 

You are wondering what all this costs. The only costs I know of are the operating costs of the computers on the net and the telephone costs of the inter-computer connections. The universities and corporations pay that cost internally. The high speed link to the USA is also free, but I have forgotten the details of that arrangement. There is a provision to bill individual users the cost of international traffic, but I have not been billed either as a student at Deakin Uni or by my present employers. So my access has been free (until someone reads this and decides to spoil my fun for spilling the beans). I am not aware of any secrecy about this, so I am making you aware of what is out there. I have asked users at other commercial sites, and their access has also been free. OK, there is some quid pro quo - my site has extensive dealings with several universities, whom we pay to do research for us, but I doubt that there is any conscious link between that and our USENET feed.

Non-commercial Use Only 

I emphasise that USENET is a totally non-commercial network. Its main purpose is to further academic research, and the universities fund the bulk of the costs. Commercial companies involved in research and development are also permitted to be on the net. Anyone transacting business over this medium will be swiftly ejected. When I said that people from the big computer companies are on the net, I should have pointed out that they are often expressing personal opinions, but what they divulge has the blessing of their employers. As long as you are asking a question or sending mail of a personal nature, it doesn't matter where you work.

Usage 

Who is locally on the net? Apart from the universities, we have RMIT, Chisholm, CSIRO, Telecom Research Labs, HP Labs, Labtam, the Blood Bank, Coles-Myer etc. At our (user group) level, I only know of the Sydney Mac user group and the UK IBM PC User Group. The UK group does it in style, providing multiple 9600 bps dial-up lines. In addition to the normal subscription, they charge £25 for BBS use and a further £35 if you want full international capability. They don't bother with the echomail type of BBS. I don't know of any sites in Melbourne that give public access to USENET, although Sydney has at least one public-access site. One Melb PC member runs such a facility in Geelong. At least a dozen Melb PC members have access through their employers.

Equipment 

It is nice to have a mainframe and a budget to match, but you can get on USENET with just an XT and MS-DOS. If you want to run a BBS, you are better off using the Xenix or Unix operating system, which gives you dozens of dial-up lines without even asking for them. Many small sites use an 80286 or 80386, a multiple serial port card, 4-12 MB RAM, 60 MB hard disk (My employers use about 20-30 MB for a full feed with a one-week expiry period, which means that you miss out on some news if you don't log on once a week. They use a mainframe, by the way.) In the following paragraphs I am referring to the needs of the dial-up site, not those of the home-based user. You need the following software, in order of importance: 

Communications - to talk to the feed site. I would recommend the Sydney University SUN package that is free to educational institutions (I am trying to get details of MHSnet software that replaces SUN), but you can get by with the UUCP utilities that are part of Unix, or other public domain unix software. The SUN package automates practically everything, so the sysop has little work. This also looks after the mail facility. 

A news reader. Although the previous software will fetch the mail and newsgroups to your machine, you need a menu-driven package that enables you to look at the subject line of each message and skim past the ones that sound boring. It should also enable you to reply to a message. SCO (suppliers of Xenix) provides registered users a news reader free upon request. 

A news poster. You need a package that enables you to post a message to a newsgroup. 

BBS software. The above software is all we have at work. When I log onto the unix box I get a "$" prompt that is like your C:\ prompt. From there I type "mail" (or "elm") to read mail, "vnews" to read news and "postnews" to post news. These programs are menu driven, but are nowhere as pretty as MS-DOS software. When I am not using these programs I am at the Unix prompt, where I could do programming or use an application - but I'm not employed as a programmer. The point I am making is that if you had access to a remote Unix machine, you not only have access to news and mail, but you also have a full computer to use if you wish. One can also isolate the user from seeing the unfriendly Unix prompt, and the cryptic world that lurks behind it. So you run a BBS package that gives your home user nothing but access to mail and news, and he or she is oblivious to the fact that the environment is Unix. A Xenix BBS shareware package called XBBS is available, and I am trying to track it down.

Halfway House 

An MS-DOS package called UFGATE enables you to have the best of the USENET and Fidonet (echomail) worlds by providing a link (gateway) between the two. That enables selected newsgroups to be copied to the echomail system and vice versa. The Melb PC BBS gets a couple of newsgroups through such a gateway in Sydney. Conversely I read the UFGATE and OS/2 echoes via USENET. I can also send mail across the two nets. There is no gateway in Melbourne that I know of. 

I am also evaluating Waffle BBS, an MS-DOS package that has a terrible user interface (I love Opus' menu system) but which can collect mail and news from a Unix system through an MS-DOS implementation of UUCP that is very fast compared with UFGATE. I sometimes leave my work PC in Xenix mode and practise sending mail to myself at home via UUCP. Waffle is still in beta release, so I can't knock it too much. It is also available in several flavours of Unix and Xenix, so it provides multiuser access if desired. End User Software. The home user needs a communications package such as Kermit, Telix, TeleMate etc.

Down Side 

Yes, all is not rosy in USENET. The main limitation is that the software is not as friendly or feature laden as found on MS-DOS BBSs. However, it is far more robust and there are no problems with multitasking. File transfer is not as convenient as, say, Opus. The files stored on the archive sites are often a couple of weeks behind the versions available locally, and most servers have a daily limit of 100 kB or three files per person. If you are a beginner at computing, you are advised to only post questions or send mail, and avoid fetching software from remote sites.

Relevance to Melb PC 

I contend that Melb PC members will benefit by access to USENET. Remember, it provides access to non-computing information too. It does not compete with the Opus BBS we have, so there is absolutely no insinuation that the latter should be scrapped. The present BBS must continue. It could even serve as Melbourne's gateway to USENET.

A second benefit would be the provision of a general access computer where you could learn Unix and practise it in safety for non-commercial purposes. Education of our members is one of our major aims. 

One of the hurdles we have to cross is whether the Australian USENET sites will permit us to join, and provide us with a feed. (Come on, you members who work at a USENET site - could you pull strings for Melb PC?) We would have to assure them that their world is not about to be shattered by nitwits. Secondly, we would need an economic number of interested members before the Committee will even get mildly interested in spending any money. I will try to get a donated machine for the purpose, but that may not be easy. We could have a dozen telephone lines if we wanted, but we would have to bear the cost. Are there any Unix-literate members who would like to run the machine or provide advice? I could do the job, but not while I am the editor.

Sampler Files on BBS 

I have uploaded the files USENET1.COM (a history of USENET), and a set of three files containing samples of what is presently seen in Melbourne on USENET (SAMPLE1.EXE, SAMPLE2.EXE and SAMPLE3.EXE). They are all self-extracting files. Download just SAMPLE1.EXE if you want a brief look at what is available. I am about to set up a limited BBS in mid-March and may place some more samples there. If we were to provide access to USENET, it would need to be funded by an additional fee, so that the general membership was not subsidising it. This would be a service charge, not a new class of membership. I would also like to see a mechanism to deny access to irresponsible users. If you feel that you would like to have such a service please write to me care of the group's office or leave a message on the BBS. Follow-up discussion will be on our BBS. 

Reprinted from the March 1990 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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