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NetMonth, January 1988
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* * The independent guide to Bitnet *
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* * January 1988 *
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* * Volume 2, Number 6 - 7 *
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Christopher Condon Editor CONDON @ YALEVM
Mike Patrick Contributing Editor PATRICK @ YALEVM
Glen Overby Technical Assistant NU070156 @ NDSUVM1
Gary Moss Staff Supervisor MOSS @ YALEVM
******************** Contents - Issue 17 ********************
EDITORIAL PAGE_________________________________________________
Bitnotes / Chris Condon ..................................... 1
The Human Factor / Timothy Stephen .......................... 3
Forty-two / Mike Patrick .................................... 7
Computers and Society Digest / Dave Taylor .................. 8
FEATURES_______________________________________________________
The Bitnet Technical Meeting Agenda ........................ 10
SCUP and the SCUP Newsletter ............................... 12
Domains-style Names in BITNET .............................. 14
The JANET Computer Network ................................. 16
The Listservs with /WHOIS .................................. 17
DEPARTMENTS____________________________________________________
Headlines .................................................. 18
New Mailing Lists .......................................... 19
Helpdesk ................................................... 26
Feedback ................................................... 27
Policies ................................................... 30
* For information on subscribing to NetMonth, submitting *
* articles, sending letters, and printing this file, see *
* the "Policies" section on the last pages of this issue. *
---------------------< Distribution: 1854 >--------------------
A publication of the Bitnet Services Library
"Because We're Here"
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*********
* * Bitnotes
* *
* * by Christopher Condon
* *
* * CONDON@YALEVM
*********
"Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
- Aldous Huxley
A roll in the muck is often enlightening, even if it does tend
to be a bit messy. I am not, however, suggesting that you lay
down in the nearest mud puddle and splash about. Rather, I am
using the word "muck" as a synonym for certain animal waste
products, the names of which I would most likely be keelhauled
for printing. By an odd coincidence, these words serve very
well to describe the usual debates concerning students who use
BITNET. In a word, muck.
The student, it seems, is an anomaly in BITNET. On the one
hand he is faced with a globe-spanning network of people and
possiblities; on the other he is generally offered little or no
guidance on how to access it. When information is provided, it
too often answers the question "How?" without ever considering
"Why?"
I am guilty of this myself. The BITNET USERHELP file and the
online BITLIB help system provide plenty of "how-to"
information. That, however, is as far as they go. It is up
to the user to find an application for this information. For
example, a recent addition to BITNET USERHELP was "How to find
people in BITNET". The question is valid, but the usefulness
of this information is unknown. Who do you want to contact?
Why? For the researcher, staff member, faculty member, even
graduate student the answer is readily apparent. There is a
need for specific information, a task to accomplish.
The undergraduate, however, generally has no such need.
Presented with the "How-tos" of BITNET, the natural reaction is
to explore, experiment, and play. It is this lack of purpose
that often makes the student in the network a burden rather
than an active member of the BITNET community. The blame for
this missing direction does not fall upon the user, of course.
The fault lies in the lack of a total plan when institutions
join the network.
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If a student is given access to the network, BITNET must be
integrated with the curriculum. I have no degree in education,
so I am not one to say how this should be accomplished.
However, as a recent student, I may be able lend some insight.
As a Computer Science major, my interest was not in using
BITNET for any particular end, but rather in the network itself
and what it offered. A class in telecommunications is idealy
suited to this type of information: How the network runs,
electronic mail, load issues, Relays, file servers... all of
these issues and services are available for hands-on use
(virtually speaking). A textbook can't hold a candle to
experience.
More importantly, an approach such as this gives the student a
reason for being here. He may actually learn something in the
process.
*****
So, how do you like it?
This issue launches our big format changes. Some of them are
simply cosmetic, and hopefully to your liking. Others are more
substantial.
The major addition to this issue is the Editorial Page: Thank
goodness for kind and interesting people. This month we
introduce two regular columnists: The first is Timothy
Stephen, one of the people who runs the file/name/what-have-you
server COMSERVE@RPICICGE. The title of the column is The Human
Factor. This is a play on the title of a branch of psychology
called "human factors research" that is concerned with finding
out how to make technology easier for humans to use. That will
be the central theme of his editorials in coming months.
On the other end of the spectrum we have Mike Patrick, a new
BITNET user and a good friend of mine. I have brought him onto
the staff for the unique reason that he knows nothing about
BITNET. Hence, his Forty-two column will present a look at
network users from from the outside. This may shed some light
on just how absurd what we are doing really is. Of course, as
Mike becomes more experienced, he will become just as absurd as
the rest of us.
Next month we should see Bob Boag (editor of the now-defunct
VAX Toolbox) and Judy Molka (of BITNIC fame) emerge as regular
or semi-regular columnists as well.
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Of course, all of these people will want to take time off once
in a while, so there will be plenty of room for those one-time
editorials that I know you are dying to write. As always, I am
always open to more regular columnists.
Behind the scenes, Glen Overby has been added to the staff to
help in keeping BITNET SERVERS up-to-date. Glen came to me
with a list of LISTSERV FILELISTS that I had been meaning to
put together and never found the time to start. A true BITNET-
fan, he will make my life a lot easer, and BITNET servers much
more accurate.
In the coming weeks we will begin a trial run of weekly
magazine, aptly named NetWeek. This will not replace NetMonth,
but will rather be a supplement to address our biggest
weakness: getting news to you fast. Each Monday NetWeek will
summarize the events of the previous week in a brief, concise
format. Items covered there will be presented in more detail
in more detail in NetMonth. No editorials, no features, just
the facts (and a really spiffy logo).
Virtually,
Chris CONDON@YALEVM
*********
* * The Human Factor
* *
* * by Timothy Stephen
* *
* * STEPHEN@RPICICGE
*********
Bitnet could one day rank as the most important aid to
productivity in higher education since the invention of
chalk. There's no doubt about this, the net could cause an
unparalleled transformation in the business of education.
It can link professionals and students who otherwise would
never come into contact. By dissolving barriers of distance
and time it may irrevocably alter our notion of the university
as a physically bounded entity. It can provide, for the first
time, a medium for academic interaction where communication
is unencumbered by interpersonal barriers such as race,
sex, age, and academic status. However, it is a fact that
Bitnet remains largely irrelevant in the day-to-day
activities of all but a tiny fraction of students and
academic professionals. Many don't know of its existence and,
of those that do, many don't care to learn how to use it.
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What I want to focus on in this column are some issues that I
think are going to determine whether Bitnet evolves, as it
should, into an essential academic service or whether it
becomes an obscure sideshow, largely irrelevant in the
routines of education and research. The data on which I
base this discussion are derived from my experiences --
shared with Teresa Harrison, Pete Silvestre, and others
-- in the day-to-day operation of Comserve, our file
server/listserv combination at RPICICGE.
With the exception of Pete, none of us at Comserve claim
much expertise in the technology of computing. I've
written some messy ForTran programs (the kind that make
advanced computer science students like Pete gasp in horror)
and I learned enough about CP/CMS and REXX to write the
original versions of Comserve and its interface execs. But
that's the extent of it. At Comserve we represent and
interact daily with that great majority of Bitnet users who
care much more about the way Bitnet treats us and the
services it provides than about technical issues such as
network protocols, domain name structures, data security,
RFC822, and similar obscurities. As social scientists
and human communication professionals, we tend to be more
interested in the social and organizational aspects of Bitnet
than in the technical. So my focus in this column is a
user's focus rather than that of a system programmer,
networking specialist, or site administrator.
The fact is that users' concerns and points of view tend
to be grossly under-represented in public communications on
Bitnet and this is not a healthy indicator for the network's
future. The listserv system, for example, entertains all
sorts of groups to facilitate the discussion of technology
among computing personnel, but not a single list exists for
the discussion of users' problems. To be sure, there are
lists on which the user is discussed *as a problem* (see
some of the recent entries on UG-L, for example), but since
the Bitnet Network Information Center (BITNIC) decided last
year to stop answering people's requests for information
about the network, no other formal channel has emerged to
take its place. The naive user is now expected to find out
about Bitnet at his or her host site. If the host site doesn't
do a good job in supplying this support, well, too bad.
Too bad indeed. Our experience at Comserve indicates that host
site personnel are often lagging in providing the type of
support that users need. There are sites that offer no
documentation on Bitnet, that don't provide mailers, and
that generally seem uninterested in promoting Bitnet on
campus. Although I am probably not unbiased in my view, I
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tend to think of the type of services that
organizations such as Psychnet, CSNEWS, and Comserve
provide, as, in a small way, revolutionary for the
disciplines they serve. For the communication studies
discipline, for example, Comserve provides an electronic
white pages, a listserv-type discussion system covering
various specialties, access to a 400 file database of
professional tools and announcements, and some other services.
So in December of 1985 we selected 15 sites at institutions
with large communication studies programs as targets and
sent computer mail to all administrative personnel (an average
of about four per site). We included an announcement about
Comserve, asked that they consider that faculty and
students in their local dept. of communication studies
would probably welcome a demonstration of how to use Bitnet
to access Comserve, and pointed out that Comserve adds value
to their investment in Bitnet access. Not one of
the site administrators we wrote to responded or even
acknowledged our mail and, as far as we know, not one made
contact with their local department of communication studies.
Of course site administrators have a lot to do, so why devote
staff time to promoting Bitnet? There are two good reasons:
one ethical, the other practical. The ethical consideration
is that as Bitnet and its services continue to expand, like
it or not, site personnel bear an increasing responsibility
as the gatekeepers of Bitnet resources. Some have opened
the gates widely, heralding Bitnet's capabilities and
encouraging faculty and students to try it out.
Memoranda are circulated to faculty, announcements are
printed in computing center newsletters and staff time is
allocated for the provision of workshops, online help
packages, documentation, and the maintenance or development of
software support systems. But others, for whatever
reasons, have failed to effectively communicate about
Bitnet to potential campus users. The campus' Bitnet
connection is a unique resource because if it is not announced,
explained, demonstrated, and otherwise supported, it may as
well not exist. At that point it functions merely as a
private service for campus computing personnel, a
questionable expenditure in these uncertain economic times.
On the practical side of this, schools without Bitnet are
beginning to lag behind academically. In my field, for
example, graduate students and faculty at schools that are not
on the net are among the last in the discipline to hear about
job openings (they are announced more and more often these
days on Comserve and CRTNet) and, of course, whole
categories of other services and information are also
beyond their reach. But simply establishing Bitnet at a
school is not enough. Computer staff need to market it.
They need to learn to communicate effectively about it on
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campus and they need to provide the human, textual, software
and hardware resources that make it easily accessible and
convenient to use. Ultimately, the pay-off for this will
come in the form of increased centrality and bigger budgets for
campus computing centers.
One impact of the fact that this type of activism is not wide
spread is that many users are forced to scramble for
information on their own. But effective guidance may be hard
to obtain, even when proffered by the most well meaning
computer center personnel. Here, for example, is an excerpt
from a response a systems programmer at one NOS site gave to
the question, "What's the largest size file that a user
can receive in his/her mailbox?"
"At our site, the mailboxes of most users may not
exceed 128 PRU's in length. A PRU is basically a
disk sector. A PRU is 64 Cyber words in length. A
Cyber word, on NOS, is 60 bits long. Upper case
characters and most punctuation symbols are
represented in 6 bits. Lower case characters and
ASCII control characters require 12 bits."
Sure, 12 bits. That's a dollar fifty, right? We need to find
ways of expressing essential technical distinctions in terms
that make sense to a non-technical audience. However good
his intentions, the systems programmer who composed this
response might as well have not bothered. His conception of
the user's frame of reference was so impoverished that he
probably generated more confusion that he resolved.
Bitnet could be the wave of the future. But whether it
arrives on the beach with enough force to make any
impact depends upon how effectively its representatives
communicate with the academic community and how open they are
to soliciting and considering the needs of users.
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*********
* * Forty-two
* *
* * by Mike Patrick
* *
* * PATRICK@YALEVM
*********
This, the premiere installment of what will probably be a
monthly column, will not say anything of pertainance. This is
due to the simple fact that at this point I don't know much
about what BITNET is, what it does, why it does it.
I am somewhat befuddled by Chris Condon's request for me to
produce a column for his magazine. Given, I do possess a
sparkling wit, and an excellent vocabulary. I'm also a great
writer and a vain son-of-a-gun, so it seem I fit in quite well
within the editorial context of this publication. Even if my
knowledge of computers doesn't go too far beyond Pitfall II on
my Commodore 64.
Still, if it's a column he wants, it's a column he's going to
get. I'll have you know that for the past week (in an attempt
to impress you) I've learned more about BITNET than you can
shake an abacus at. These are some of my observations thus
far:
* BITNET users have more knowledge of the computers they use
than the people built them.
* BITNET users can talk to each other from across continents -
a fact in which AT&T would likely be very interested.
* BITNET users can very likely break any code and gain entry
into any private database in existence (if they so desired).
If they banded together for just 10 minutes, they could
probably throw the entire world into a perpetual state of
higgledy-piggledy.
* BITNET users banded together for 10 minutes on a break from
the New Orleans NETCON, ans singlehandedly caused the stock
market crash.
* If you mistakenly dropped a PC Magazine in Hartford, CT, the
resulting tremor would cause half the residents of Texas to
slide into Charlotte, NC.
I told you it wasn't much, but I'm getting there. Last week I
couldn't even LIFT a PC Magazine. Honestly, the column will
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become quite a bit more informational as I work to bring myself
up to speed on the happenings in and amongst BITNET and its
users (Bitnetters? Netties?) while devoting every waking hour
to finally becoming "computer literate".
But... something just occured to me; an "observation" I failed
to observe:
* Chris Condon does not get paid to produce this magazine,
therefore I will probably not be paid to produce this column.
Well, maybe I won't work TOO hard.
*********
* * Computers and Society Digest
* *
* * by Dave Taylor
* *
* * TAYLOR%ATOM@HPLABS.HP.COM
*********
I thought readers of NetMonth might be interested in hearing
about The Computers and Society Digest that I have the
privilege of editing and publishing electronically on a regular
basis.
The Digest has been wandering around various networks, with
submissions from around the world, for over three years now,
and while we try to keep the discussion oriented around the
question;
What is the Impact of Computer Technology on Society?
Extended digressions into other related areas is not unknown.
A sample of recent topics include:
* BBSing and socialization: A discussion of people that use
computers and bulletin-board systems as a replacement for more
traditional forms of social interaction, the pros, the cons,
etc.
* Computer use and the introduction of telephones: This is an
extended digression from a discussion about Õpersonalå
computers and the third world, where some readers felt that
everyone will be thrilled to use a computer once it arrives,
and others feel that there is already too much apathy in
public-participation issues. The specific is from a
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comparison of the acceptance of the phone system in the early
1900s to the acceptance of computer systems in the closing
years of the 20th century.
* Education vs. Right Think and Thinking with Hypertexts: What
is the purpose of education? Are we supposed to learn how to
think, or how to follow the paths of thought and chains of
logic of our teachers and peers? How does this relate to
HyperText and other systems where the inter-connections between
the various sets of information is just as important as the
information itself? Specifically, who will be allowed to make
connections?
* Graduate Programs in Computers & Society: A general
information request from a reader.
* The Implications of HyperText, and other HyperMedia Systems:
Again, more discussion of hypertext. This one is about what it
means to our society for our information to be physically
linked in specific, well defined ways.
* Information and Empowerment: Information, as many people
have said, is Power. How does that related to the computer?
* Parental Responsibility and Software Piracy: A recent case
by Atari demonstrated that the law now considers parents
legally responsible for acts committed by their children,
regardless of whether they could understand what was going on.
Will Atari winning the case and the courts finding the parents
of a child software pirate affect the saless of computers to
homes? What about the protection schemes?
* University Education and Industry Needs: Universities get
money from industry to aid in research, but this money has a
way of forcing the research to move in more 'marketable'
directions rather than simply more interesting or 'promising'
directions. How does this affect the ability of our
universities to perform reasonable research? What are the
long-term ramifications of university research being owned by
the company that sponsors the research, rather than the
specific university (and by extension the public at large).
* What the software market might look like in 1998: Right now
it's awkward and trying to find a middle ground between
paperback books and the IBM call-your-sales-representative
schemes. What about in ten or twenty years? This is a blue
sky topic for sure!
* Changing Society through activeism and computers:
Traditionally, change to society has always been started at the
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grass levels and worked its way up. Now that we have computers
and global telecommunications capabilities, can we change this?
Specifically, can we utilize our existing technological
resources to improve the state of mankind? This discussion is
moving to some interesting observations about the lack of a
representative demographic cross-section of society too.
It's quite an informal discussion forum (but no flames allowed)
and I strongly encourage you to either sign up for a few issues
or ask the BYUADMIN LISTSERV file archive for a back issue or
two:
For a sample back issue, send the following command to
LISTSERV@BYUADMIN by message or mail:
SEND COMSOC-L v3n1
To join the BITNET distribution of the mailing list:
SUBSCRIBE COMSOC-L Your_Name
*********
* * The BITNET Technical Meeting Agenda
* *
* * by Scott Earley
* *
* * EARLEY@BITNIC
*********
The BITNIC would like to offer an outline of the topics
targeted for discussion. Meetings are held in Working Group
format, thus we hope for a particularly high level of
commitment into the future. Plans are to run four similar
gatherings per year; two preceding each bi-annual DECUS and
SHARE meeting. This should allow for maximum participation of
the numerous technicians who collectively help to keep BITNET
interactive.
Objective: To provide a forum for BITNET users to become
involved with network-related issues and to develop proposals
for submission to the BITNET Board of Trustees.
Host: California State University - Fullerton, McCarthy Hall.
About eight miles from Anaheim Convention Center, details
forthcoming.
When: Saturday, February 27, 1988
Time: 8:15 AM for free registration and refreshments
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Structure: The meeting opens with a one-hour Plenary Session
at 9:00 after which the Working Groups will break off for the
rest of the morning. Following lunch the groups reconvene,
allowing time for a summary and wrap-up later in the afternoon.
Plenary Session: Chair: BITNET official, TBA
Provide an overview of important issues on BITNET; drawing
from, but limited to, the topics listed below for discussion by
the Working Groups.
Working Groups: (please choose one area of interest)
1. Node Management Chair: open
* Report on recommendations made at earlier meetings
* Essential tags and optimal format for the NAMES/NODES
files
* Create list of node management tools for BITNET
representatives
* Discussion of the BITNET/EARN/NetNorth update procedures
and coordination
* Announcements on new EARN administration
* Impact of volume charging on EARN's use of BITNET servers
2. Tools Chair: Jim Gerland
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