Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!alberta!ubc-cs!van-bc!sl
From: sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: I thought we were in this together -- AT&T not upholding its end..
Message-ID: <1824@van-bc.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jun 88 19:23:37 GMT
References: <875@flatline.UUCP> <897@flatline.UUCP> <457@happym.UUCP> <728@vsi.UUCP>
Reply-To: sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne)
Organization: Wimsey Associates, Vancouver, BC.
Lines: 35

In article <728@vsi.UUCP> friedl@vsi.UUCP (Stephen J. Friedl) writes:
>In article <457@happym.UUCP>, kent@happym.UUCP (Kent Forschmiedt) writes:

>     Gasp!  AT&T would be out of their minds to try to support
>smail or netnews.  The *overwhelming* majority of AT&T's
>customers (with the 3B2s, at least) have no interest whatsoever
>in netnews or even intermachine email; those living in the
>technical and academic worlds have no idea how uninterested most
>end-users are in this kind of thing.  They buy their computers to
>run payroll or property management or insurance administration.
>In addition, most AT&T UNIX machines don't have C compilers.
>Really, we are in the minority.

>     I could go on and on about this, but I won't.  AT&T will
>never support netnews to their customers.

Well don't be to sure. SCO offers a News disk. And reputedly have two people
working on bringing up 3.0.

It doesn't come standard, but it's free if you ask for it.

I think the main reason that smail and it's ilk arn't being supported is
just a lack of interest at the time. Remember that the software being
distributed today (ie Sys V/386) was essentially designed and packaged about
two years ago. 

It is quite probable that in the future something along the lines of smail
will find it's way into general release. Complications which may help or
hinder this are whether AT&T and other vendors think that they might be able
to sell it - and whether any of the commercial services could be tied into
to do delivery.


-- 
Stuart.Lynne@wimsey.bc.ca {ubc-cs,uunet}!van-bc!sl     Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532