Well, now thatcha mention it, I am somewhat bemused by the loss of email functionality since I quit using QWKMAIL and the BBS nets, and went on the internet.
The BBS posts were 8 bit. You had the entire 256 IBM CMOS bitmaps. The BBS posts offered ANSI color. It's not just mono like this. HTML gives you 64k of colors using <font=#"ABCDEF"> and ANSI only offered 16, but with ANSI, you can highlite text by changing the background color, whereas if you try that with HTML, it changes the background of the whole page. HTML also gives you more fonts, whereas ANSI only used the 256 char default VGA ROM set. But I hate HTML posts; sometimes the font is so small I cant read it, and sometimes a twit uses one so large it looks like an obnoxious billboard. However, the 256 char IBM set includes the greek alphabet and lots of other foreign letters. It aint hard to replace those foreign letters for italics bitmaps for english email. Font editors also allow us to alter the original IBM box characters. They were designed to produce invoice or ledger sheet double and single lines. And while they have been charmingly used for artistic purposes, replacing them with a set of geometric shapes would make email doodles more adaptable. I see where people in email now continually complain of being misquoted, how attribution with the system of single, double, triple,.. angle brackets is often misleading. But my QWKMAIL put my words up here in amber, and before citing yours, not only is there the std angle bracket, but also your initials at the start of the line, like below, and that furthermore, yours were in green. A third party blue, a 4th red. But clearly, you dont need 64k colors for this. Which is the point. That HTML offers that many colors, not because it was designed for email and the clearest presentation of text possible, but that it was designed to mimic commercial messages, flyers, and other forms of what we all now know as spam. QWKMAIL offered me enough colors to keep track of who said what in a thread, but no more than were useful for that purpose. HTML, and much of the software we see today, has a lot more options, but its like finding 50 different brands of toothpaste. If there were only 6, I'd find one I could use sooner. QWKMAIL ran in whatever font I had, but whereas this browser takes up about 30-40% of the screen, whereas the text mode ANSI email screen commonly had only the 1 stat bar and 49 lines of your message. The constriction is seen on how often people respond without having read past the 25th or 30th line. And of that, the top 6-12 lines are taken up by the internet address header, whereas the BBS mail commonly used a single line with the name of the author and the host BBS. Has anyone noticed among all the multimedia eye candy that there's been a decrease in the content and functionality of email? Does that not say interesting things about the way people fail to think? I hear some guy on c-span this morning discussing anti-spam legislation. Why- is it up to them? With the BBS nets, it was impossible to post anonymously. The sysop of every BBS was responsible to see that none of his users over grazed the commons with commercial messages. The email lists like this didnt have a spam problem, and neither did the user base. If you found obscene language offensive, you could find a net that didnt permit it. If you tolerated that in your search for divergent opinion, you could find it. The BBS nets were not token ring. email did not circulate on the backbone, but came from a particular user, at a particular BBS and went to designated addresses and email lists. If someone tried to send a copy of a post to 1000 addresses, the software picked up on it and stuffed in an error box. When you subbed to a BBS, you could designate who you would accept mail from. You didnt need legislation to stop spam. You could provide a list of the usergroups you wanted like this, and the interesting posters you knew. We dont need them to pass more phucking law, all we need to do is decide on how we want to run our own network. With QWKMAIL, I could deal with 300 list posts a day. Whereas the browser gives me 6-10 messages and then the displayed message below, OFFLINE.EXE gave me a list of 49 messages, and when I clicked on one, it displayed 49 lines of the message. Since it ran in ANSI color, the flicks were faster than you can drag a mouse to the next icon. The gui kept screens in the background, layering the windows, where you could kind of see them, but the ANSI text mode screen had video pages as well, only you had to be able to see them with your mind's eye. (If you cant do that, dont bother responding to this post. You are too stupid.) Anyway, the BBS mail tools let me tag each message without opening any, and then delete or move them all to be dealt with later. I could sort a newsgroup by author, and tag delete the twits. If someone had a graphic image they wanted me to see, they could attach a .GIF; I used my own GIFVIEW.EXE to look at it, and it didnt matter what kind of virus might be in it, the viewer is just a viewer, puts a picture on the screen, and is too stupid to do anything else with it, much less mess up my system. Is there a problem with this? Perhaps I have not expressed myself well, but the point is, that it is more difficult to use email now than it used to be; given the reputation of the computer business for 'progress', that's odd. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]