Subject: File 4--chinet review
Date: Sat Jul 13 11:05:05 1991
From: root%igloo.uucp@eecs.nwu.edu

<Moderator's note: We came across the following blurb and asked
the author to send it over to us. Chinet is developing a strong
repution and is one of a growing number of hangouts for
for literate users, good discussions, and some interesting
wandering.>

We don't ordinarily review electronic bulletin boards (bbs), but we
feel one deserves honorable mention for the well balanced offerings
which have been made available by system administrator Randy
Suess for a number of years. Randy is the hardware half of the
original Ward & Randy CBBS, the first ever public access bbs. The
original CBBS is still operated by Ward, at (312) 545-8086. It is
a purely technical bbs related to computer hardware and software.

My personal exposure to home computing arrived the day that Commodore
dropped their price for the C-64 to $ 189 through discount merchandisers.
I went the day after I saw the first ad and purchased the machine, a disk
drive, and a tape unit.

Some time later, I acquired a modem and found chinet. This was my baptism
into the UNIX religion. I became a convert and completely skipped CPM. I
found multi-conference multi-thread conferencing, and USENET. Within a year
I had my own unix system, and opened it to share with others on two phone
lines.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, usenet is an anarchistic
association of machines which forwards text in some 1000 organized
topics to every major college, university, corporation, research
facilities, and public access sites on five continents. The traffic is on
the order of some 16 to 18 million characters of text per day. Much of the
distribution takes place over the INTERNET which is funded by the National
Science Foundation. Topics range from mathematics in contexts barely
resembling human thought, to interactive social studies. The local bbs has a
number of conferences covering both technical and humanist disciplines.
There is a massive database of source code which may be downloaded without
any uploads required. Electronic mail (e-mail) is available to those who
learn to use it. Such mail, within reason, is forwarded without charge
to any other linked site in the world. I have had three complete two
way exchanges from Chicago to Boston in a single business day.

PC Pursuit is a common carrier service using dedicated lines with computer
mainframe interfaces. They sell time blocks on an as available basis
after business hours to people wishing to access computers in distant
cities. For information on this service, call (800) 736-1130.

CHINET may be reached by PC Pursuit. Randy has two guest lines at
(312) 283-0559. Additional services (more lines, fewer restrictions on
usenet availability) can be arranged upon an annual contribution. Newuser
registration is online and immediate access is permitted. Remember to mention
Full Disclosure during the online registration. Don't expect to find any
secret boards hidden from the general public. Do expect to find all sorts
of surprises once you learn your way around the system.

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