Message-ID: <anews.Auiucdcs.214>
Newsgroups: net.news
Path: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
From: uiucdcs!essick
Date: Mon Apr 12 21:55:02 1982
Subject: How do you read news?
How do you read net-news?
I am interested in what sorts of terminals people are using to read news and
how fast they are running them.
Whether the terminal is a vt-100 or a Hazeltine 1500 is not of particular in-
terest. I'm looking for the general categories of hardcopy, crt, brain-
damaged, dumb, quasi-intelligent, intelligent, and gifted. I would also like
to know what size screen is being used - good old 24x80, or something else.
And how fast do you run your terminal?
It would be ideal if one person on each system would accumulate these stats
and mail them to me, but that is probably too much to expect. Anyway,
responses to me via mail. I will distill whatever I get and put it back on
the net.
If you use some other method of reading the news (like printing it and then
reading it at your leisure), I would be interested in that also.
Thanks,
Ray Essick
decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
Message-ID: <bnews.uiucdcs.121>
Newsgroups: net.news
Path: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
X-Path: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
From: uiucdcs!essick
Date: Wed May 12 03:22:37 1982
Subject: How They Read Netnews - from a notesfile
Posted: Tue May 11 16:26:14 1982
Received: Wed May 12 03:22:37 1982
#N:uiucdcs:10900001:000:1732
uiucdcs!essick May 11 15:51:00 1982
Responses to my query about how people read netnews have fi-
nally stopped coming in. As one would expect, at least one of every-
thing is being used on the net.
Baud rates seemd to be concentrated at 1200 and 9600. Those
two were roughly even with about 40% of the readers belonging to each.
The remainder tended to be 4800 baud. A smattering of the replies use
19.2 and 38.4. And a few people use 300 baud. Many of the 1200 baud
readers are on dial-ins.
I was interested in how many of the terminals were smart
enough to do cursor addressing and clearing screens, admittedly this
does not require too many smarts. More the 90% of those who replied
use a terminal that is at least that smart.
A limited number (only 2 replies) of people run the news
through lpr and read it later; the reasons included forwarding it to
people without access to a machine and vision problems.
The survey's intent was to see what sort of potential my
"notesfile" system would have across the network. "Notes" works best
on a cursor addressable CRT. We run almost all 9600 baud at Illinois
and have converted to "notes". Our copy of B news acts as a gateway
to the rest of the network; I'm not sure if anyone uses it for reading
news.
Information on the notesfile system can be had by mailing to
me at:
decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
I will send a copy of the "Notesfile Reference Manual" to anyone that
sends me a U.S. mail address. (It would save me money if I only had to
send 1 copy per site and someone would make any extra copies there).
Ray Essick decvax!pur-ee!uiucdcs!essick
University of Illinois
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