From: davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane)
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.bbs.misc
Subject: Re: BBS Standards Committee Formed
Date: 22 Aug 92 23:06:17 GMT
Followup-To: alt.bbs
Organization: Aegis Society, Kyoto Japan

larry@gator.rn.com (Larry Snyder) writes:

>Denny.Chuang@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Denny Chuang) writes:

>>   I'm against, if those companies are going to use BBS as a tool for making
>>profit .    If they can do us some good for free that would be great!  
>>But, nothing is free right?  

>and "you get what you pay for" applies -- sometimes
>
>the majority of Free BBS's come and go -- many almost overnight

>We've operated a system no for just about 10 years -- starting
>on a HeathKit H-89, then moving into Compupro S100 machines
>and now on 486/50 networked boxes with 10 high speed modems running
>SVR4 4.0.  We've stayed with the times -- and a good percentage
>of our users appreciate that.  We charge $35/year for access, and
>supply usenet feeds (we are on the internet) $2 per hour, $60 setup
>with $7.50 min billing per month) -- and while we don't get rich,
>we usually have enought to cover the phone bills..

Sounds good, and Aegis is migrating in the same direction, in 
7 years it's gone from a single line on an NEC 9801 running a
home-brew system in BASIC to a 486/386 network with 5 lines. 

Now this kind of stuff doesn't grow on trees so Aegis is supported
by memberships in the Aegis Society for 10,000 or 20,000 yen/year.
Because of the difficulty of becoming a non-profit in Japan, it is
classed as my "extra professional income" (read loss, it's always in
the red :) Aegis is a run as a non-profit service, that is, it's
purpose is to provide communication services for it's members. 

Now a lot of people haven't done their homework and simply equate
fee = commerical, and no fee = non-profit. But this really isn't so;
it's the *intent* of the organization that makes the difference. If
the intent is to make a profit, it's a commerical, for-profit. If
the intent is to provide a service for the benefit of it's members,
it's non-profit. That's undoubtedly overly simplistic, but I think
it's generally so. 

But I digress ... as for standards, when it comes to communication,
we need to at least have some conventions, otherwise we would be
able to understand each other. I think if you look at the number of
machines using the RFC xxxx conventions, and look at the amount of
traffic they handle (in the last year, Aegis has received over 3
million articles from USENET, which isn't very many as we are only
subscribed to about 500 newsgroups), the RFC's could be said to be
the de facto convention. Coming down the road, and in operation in
some places, is X.400 but that's more of a hard-decided standard,
than a convention and I suspect it will take some time before it
becomes as widely used as the RFC conventions. 

IMHO, the RFC conventions, USENET, etc., all stem from Dennis
Ritchie's insight that the power of a system comes more from the
relationships among its members than the members themselves.
Undoubtedly he was thinking of programs, but I think it applies to
people and machines as well.  If this is so--and I feel it is--then
it really doesn't matter what kind of wing-ding wonderful BBS
somebody codes up, a seeming grungy old dog of something that is
connected into a network as big as USENET will always provide more
power to the people who use it. 

I think it all depends on what you want, and I know how hard it is
to put your own, self-created baby on the shelf and start learning
the in-place conventions of an already existing network.  Three
years later, the machine that ran the first Aegis still sits there
with it's hard disk just like it was two years ago when I turned it
off and fired up Waffle on a 386 and linked it to the net. 

In terms of seeing all my Blood Sweat and Tears come to something,
a real come down. In terms of providing something useful for the 
members of Aegis, the best thing and I'm glad I did it.

Thanks for listening,

Dave

--
Dave McLane 
JUNET: davidg@aegis.or.jp (ONLY within Japan: post otherwise)
Nagaokakyoshi, Kyoto Japan Tel: +81-75-951-1168 Fax: +81-75-957-1087
Newsgroups: alt.bbs,comp.bbs.misc