Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!ast From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Bye Message-ID: <3439@ast.cs.vu.nl> Date: 29 Sep 89 20:25:12 GMT References: <3384@ast.cs.vu.nl> <1127@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam Lines: 26 In article <1127@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> rwa@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Ross Alexander) writes: > >Andy, you're kidding, right?? You're getting out to the Usenet just fine. >Let the bitnet types stew in their own juices, say I. That remark was sort of a joke. I think most people understood that. I sent a message to a person in Berlin once, and for two weeks afterward I received about 20 messages per day informing me that that obscure node in Germany was overloaded. I can live with one discrete remark from ND. There is a famous ARPANET war story about the time one of the IMPs had a dead memory bank and decided it had zero delay to all other IMPs. Within five seconds the routing algorithm decided to send all traffic in the entire ARPANET to that IMP. The moral of the story is: when a computer tells you something that violates all common sense, take it with a metric ton of salt. As to bitnet, while emotionally I agree with you, the individuals on bitnet are usually not responsible for the fact that their university administration has some big IBM behemoth that talks bitnet. Our university has a big IBM monstrosity too, and they are also on bitnet. I thank my lucky stars that we also have a USENET feed. But for the grace of God I'd be stuck on bitnet too. Telling the university to get rid of the IBM monstrosity and bitnet with it just causes them to take it away and come back with a bigger one. Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)