Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!isishq!doug From: doug@isishq.math.waterloo.edu (Doug Thompson) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: No games or picture files for now Message-ID: <154.233B2DD3@isishq.math.waterloo.edu> Date: 24 Sep 88 03:36:06 GMT Organization: International Student Information Service -- Headquarters Lines: 237 dan@maccs.UUCP (Dan Trottier) writes: >Personally I feel that binary and source groups for non Unix machines - >are there any? - should be circulated on a seperate network where's my >asbestos suit! - I'm thinking about the Amigas, Ataris, MS DOS and other >single user non Unix based machines. If we - The USENET - are going to >support electronic mail messaging for anyone who can buy a PC (Personal >computer of any kind) and plug into the system then we had better start >thinking of ways to recover costs. I don't think the mandate of USENET >was to provide electronic mail to every household in the known world! UUCP mail and news software is now running on hundreds of IBM PC compatible micros under DOS, quite aside from the Xenix boxes. The hundreds could potentially become thousands. So the question you raise about "mail to every household" is quite relevant and will (whether we like it or not) become an issue that has to be addressed by the Usenet community. This message is being entered at the console of isishq. Isishq is an 80286 based IBM clone. It runs "ufgate" under DOS 3.21 for a couple of hours a day in a uucp protocol g link. It has two modems and in each of two DoubleDOSpartitions runs a dial-up BBS. Users can read news, post news, send and receive mail while logged on. In addition, "point" software I've written allows users to install a series of programs on their own DOS PC which turn their box into a downstream uucp node, such that they can get news and mail feeds from isishq. From the end-user's point of view, this is technology which *can* provide electronic mail to every household in the world. From the "net" point of view, this sort of software increases the potential number of participants quite significantly. That could, in time, present a number of challenges to the net >A time will come when these services are widely available from companies >specializing in this area. To some extent it already has with COMPUSERVE, >Envoy and others. E-mail is available from Envoy if you're rich. Conferencing is not. Indeed it is pretty hard to figure out how to make money from conferencing. Neither Compu$erve nor Envoy offer a service which is remotely comparable to Usenet or Fidonet. I've studied the "marginal costs" of providing e-mail services to users around the world. Inlcuded in the calculations are real long distance costs using existing Trailblazer modem technology. Assuming direct phone calls placed to Australia from Waterloo for each message, the cost of data transmission is about $2/100Kb - or 1 or 2 cents to send an average sized news article or e-mail message - to Australia. When you consider that commerical e-mail services charge anywhere from 25 cents to several dollars for an e-mail message within North America, you can see that the mark-up is pretty substantial. For Usenet systems, from tiny ones such as mine to giant ones like watmath to charge the user the *marginal* cost of carrying the message plus a 200% markup would result in a system capable of providing e-mail to every household in the known world. Given the volume that can be carried by two modems on one 80286 box, this price structure would more than pay for the administration and capital costs of such a system, and provide every household in the world with the capability of sending e-mail to any other household in the world for less than 1 cent per message. When I look at those numbers (and I could be off by a factor of 10 and it doesn't much matter) and I look at Compu$erve and Envoy, I ask one question: Why? Why should we, the people, pay them a fortune to do what we can do for ourselves for a pittance, with our own desktop computers and our own modems? >Maybe it's time for USENET to go back to its original mandate which was >to foster a community feeling amongst Unix users and help share ideas >and solutions. Actually I don't think there was an original mandate but >I believe this comes close to the intention of its creators. Sure, a technical "unixnet" makes a great deal of sense, as does a technical "dosnet". Generally we accomplish this by splitting up discussions into newsgroups. No system *has* to carry a newsgroup of no interest to its users. Any system that carries a newsgroup for another system should not feel badly about asking that other system to share the financial burden. Usenet news is much more than just technical discussion, although the technical material is arguably the most valuable. More and more people who are not "tekkies" are using conferencing to share ideas and organize activities on a global scale. Cheap world-wide conferencing has a huge potential social impact. Educators and environmentalists, social justice activists and student journalists (to name just a few) are using the network to shatter international barriers and prejudices, share information, and organize globally. What commerical system could mobilize the connectivity and economies available in Usenet today? Why not sell surplus CPU cycles overnight to the "net", why not have the computer make money while you sleep? Make money you ask? Sure. Usenet has the technical capacity to eventually provide e-mail and conferencing to every household in the known world for a trivial cost, and permit every machine owner in the net to not only recoup the costs of doing so, but make a few bucks on the side, while providing an invaluable service to the entire human race. In general the value of computer conferences is directly proportional to the number of participants (assuming adequate moderation). To a very large extent our investment in Usenet links is rendered *more* valuable as the net grows. Not only can we reach more people by e-mail, but conferences are enriched by having more sources of ideas and experience. The variety increases, which also increases the value. >> >>With the excellent job that Rick is doing at uunet if I had to *pay* to down >>load a feed I probably wouldn't take *any* sources groups. I would simply >>grab the archive index on a periodic basis and download *what I want. > >Yes I agree. >> >>Personally I think that sites like uunet will be the only thing that keeps >>the net from collasping. Support your local pay as you go site! >Well I'm not so sure about this but they do make things so much smoother. > Sure, why not? Why shouldn't those who benefit share the cost? The cost is trivial! Having a many users logged on for an hour or more a day is not trivial. Feeding another Usenet site a few newsgroups on a fast modem is pretty trivial . . . given you can do that with a $5000 286 box. The total cost (including hardware and operator time) involved in using automated software on PC clones is probably hugely less than doing the same job with a Vax. (I don't know a lot about Vax economics, i.e. cost per user/hour or cost per kilobyte transferred overall). I do know a lot about clone economics. With one 286 box and the end-point software I've written I can serve 300 users modest volumes of personal mail and 10 newsgroups each, with two connects per day per user. The system requires very little maintenance and one person could easily maintain 100 such systems. That's service to 30000 users for the cost of $500,000 in hardware and one staff position. That's $17 per user for the capital, $1 per year per user for the staff time. Makes Compu$erve look downright pricey! And there are probably much cheaper ways to do it that I haven't thought of. Bill the user 1 cent per message for telecom costs and you cover your phone bill with a very tidy profit! The software exists. I'm running it. Some of it I even wrote. The rest is PD or shareware. The question may not be, "can we (Usenet) afford to extend access to every household in the world?". The question may be, "Can we afford not to?" Basically, the cat is out of the bag. Using uucp mail and news conventions, micro-computers are coming on-line. As we move from the first generation of PC Usenet software into the second generation, it will be a lot easier (and smoother). Given the sort of economies outlined above (which are based on real-world demonstration projects) people will link up to Usenet in increasing numbers. This will present some challenges to the net. Like most challenges it also presents tremendous opportunities. The sign on Macdonalds' restaurant reads "42 billion served". I do hope one day my log-on screen can read: "8 billion served". I can't for the life of me see any reason why *not*. The issues to be addressed that I can see right now involve three things: 1. Economics, a viable billing system for network services rendered, 2. Newsgroup control when participation becomes vast, 3. Network management and administration; And perhaps a fourth: fear. I am certainly aware that the system operating here on my box would not be possible without a huge array of PD and shareware programs representing a vast amount of work by thousands of programmers. To that pile I have added but a tiny little bit. But the result of all those thousands of man-years of effort (much of it volunteer) when combined with cheap, ubiquitous PCs and fast modems is the basic technical capacity to connect every household in the known world for staggeringly low prices. Access to Usenet and FidoNet has transformed my life. It has allowed me to make friends in dozens of countries, and exposed me to ideas and concepts which I would not have encountered otherwise. It has allowed me to participate, if only a little, in an amazing coterie of public-spirited programmers offering their intellectual property to their fellow-men for a pittance, or for free. Even if it could be demonstrated that it were a good thing to place limits to the growth of this phenomenon, I do not think you could actually do it. Limit it to Unix you could. Next year Xenix will be called Unix. More and more PCs are running Xenix all the time, and with the new generation of 386 boxes, unix may become the PC standard. DOS represents our teething stage. 386 Boxes tend to dissolve many of the distinctions between minis and micros, and with steadily declining prices, we are going to witness Vax 1170 power in desktop home computers in this generation. Think about it. A laptop Vax with gigabytes of disk space. This is not science fiction. Such are being planned for. One day *you* will probably wake up one Christmas morning to find one under the tree! I think that the option of going back to what Usenet was n years ago is not open to us. The future holds something quite different; truly universal (or at least planetary) connectivity to e-mail and conferencing, and any other data-transmission that can be digitized. And yeah, it'll probably be pay as you go. But at a penny a message, who needs Compu$erve. We have built/are building something profoundly more significant! When ISDN lines allow us to replace our slow 14000 BAUD modems with 64000 BAUD data channels, the marginal cost of transmission may disappear altogether. Like the roads, the gov'ts of the worlds may end up providing the conduit and letting anyone use it. At 1 1/100 of a cent per message is it worth keeping count? Charge him $10 per year and call it square! Thanks, Dan, for your thought-provoking article. You're right, we had better start thinking of ways of recovering costs! Regards, =Doug -- Doug Thompson - via FidoNet node 1:221/162 UUCP: ...!watmath!isishq!doug Internet: doug@isishq.math.waterloo.edu