From: peter@global.hacktic.nl (Peter Busser)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.bbs.misc
Subject: Re^2: BBS Standards Committee Formed (mine)
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 92 10:51:48 GMT
Organization: Global Village 1

dawson@willard.UUCP writes:

>greenie@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu writes:

>> Yes yes yes those are all fine and dandy for machines that are housed
>> in large facilities that have tons of money to throw away on disk space
>> (IE Unix and VMS systems in Universities and larger corporations) but
>> most BBS's these days are PC (that's PC not IBMPC) based and usually those
>> who operate these systems don't feel like using some bland ascii format that
>> offers no form of storage compression...

>Last I looked, disk space for PC's was (and I'm sure still is) MUCH less
>expensive than the same space for Unix or VMS platforms.
And last time I looked, PC's (that is IBM-PC's) were able to run UNIX. Don't
say that UNIX is expen$ive, it's not. Just get yourself a copy of Linux (just
ftp it from tsx-11.mit.edu or nic.funet.fi) and see if it meets your needs.
Tune in on comp.os.linux for more information.

>Not that that has ANYTHING to do with message header definitions.
But it's a sily debate because:

1. MooSe-DOS uses 2K-4K clusters whereas UNIX uses 512byte blocks. That means
   that a 1500 byte large message (which is typical for my FidoNet system,
   which has a *.MSG message base) wastes 500-2500 bytes as it always fits in
   one cluster. The same message would waste only a few bytes on my Linux
   machine.
   On the average every file on a system wastes half a disk block (or cluster,
   depending on which term your OS uses). On a MooSe-DOS system this means that
   every file on a disk with a 2K cluster size wastes 1K and with a 4K cluster
   size 2K! Note that this average assumes that all files on a disk are large
   files, which of course is not true. A smaller block size is more efficient
   with smaller files.

2. Crosspostings result in a copy of the message on a MooSe-DOS system. For a
   crossposting to N newsgroups, the system wastes (N-1)*message size in
   clusters of diskspace. On a UNIX system crosspostings *CAN* be done by a
   so called link (symbolic or hard, doesn't really matter). That means that
   a message only takes up dikspace once regardless of the number of newsgroups
   it was crossposted to. It depends of course on the implementation of the
   software if it is done that way or not. FidoNet doesn't know cross-postings
   so that's only a problem for USENET news systems.

3. A FidoNet binary header is fixed length. The subject for instance is always
   72 bytes long. In an ASCII based header, headerlines are variable length. A
   line with 'Subject: Hello!' only takes 15 bytes which is much less than the
   72 bytes in a similar FidoNet message.

4. FidoNet messages may have a shorter header, but the message text itself
   contains information too. All the ^A kludge lines are comparable to the
   RFC822 header lines.

Conclusion: the debate about ASCII headers is very very silly. While we are
looking through a microscope to a few bytes, the system wastes many hundreds
of K's without anyone noticing it.

>> (Just so that no one think's I'M uninformed, our company develops software fo
>> both PC's and DEC VAX/VMS systems...)
But not for UNIX aparently. Any ISA/EISA 386 that is capable of running OS/2
is capable of running Linux. Linux is a free UNIX clone for the 386 and up. It
is in beta stadium, but don't let that fool you, it is very stable (it passed
the crashme test), complete and easy to install and use.

Greetings,
Peter Busser