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 DoubleDOS  partitions 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