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)