From: Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.datacomm
Subject: Re: FCC considering "modem fees" again
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 92 11:49:52 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
  <62802@cup.portal.com> <3417@faatcrl.UUCP> <Bs2KD7.9q@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
  <3436@faatcrl.UUCP>

Jack Radigan sez:
>
>  No matter how bad some others make out the high cost of CIS over their 
>cheaper systems, the one benefit you have is the ability to use automated
>messaging programs like TapCIS for the PeeCee or Whap! for the Amiga.  Both
>are supported online there and can really make for some economical messaging,
>so long as you resist downloading and save that for a local BBS or new Fish
>disk.
>
>  Another plus, especially people like me who are not local to a Tymnet or
>Telenet indial is the fact the CIS often has a local indial that doesn't add
>another few dollars per hour to the connection.
>
>  -jack-

In other words, Jack, use the CI$ automated programs to see what's new
in their libraries but don't download there, cuz their prices are so
high.. instead, go scour local BBSes (and put up with busy signals)
or wait and see if the stuff shows up on Fish Disks?  I don't know if
you keep up with Fish Disks, but as good a job as Fred does on utilities,
languages, source code, programming and such (and this is NOT to take away
anything from Fred Fish.. he is a SAINT in the Amiga community as far as
I'm concerned), his disks are very lean on art, graphics, pictures,
animations, music, demos and such. Besides, you can't hardly justify
defending a service whose prices are so high that you actually
DIScourage people from downloading there. That's pretty wacky.

Besides that, a national or international online service offers a sense
of "community" that simply can't be found on one or two line user-run
BBSes. It's also highly unlikely that you can log into a BBS and find
dozens of big-name Amiga developers hanging out, posting notices and
answering questions (and putting a stop to rumors).

So the question then becomes how much a user is willing to spend to
use a national pay service and still be able to eat and have
shelter.  Don't you think that a service with enormous Amiga resources
on board, one that's multi-user and well-maintained, and is MUCH
lower priced than another service should be considered as an extremely
viable alternative? It would seem that only the rich wouldn't care.

If it helps to sweeten the stew any, Portal customers are about to be
treated to a fully intuitionized Amiga front end which will allow
them to do all the things the programs you named can do on their host
system: capture streams of notices and read and reply to them offline
(using one's favorite text editor), get file catalogs and choose files
to be downloaded upon next log in, read and reply to email, and so on.
This program has been in development a long time and we've had a couple
dozen Beta testers bashing away on it for many months now. It's fully
free-standing, coded in C, and doesn't require another terminal program
or any scripting to set up and operate. As an added plus, the author
of the program is going to release it as fully-enabled shareware. 
No crippling of features. No demanding bucks up front to get a useful
version. 

So there are ways to do things, and there are other ways to do things.
One can submit to a barrage of advertising and then learn how fast
a credit card can melt.  Or one can do a bit of judicious shopping and
learn of the alternatives out there whereby they can get just as much,
no, MORE of what they're after and do it for a mere fraction of the
cost.  

I'm pleased to be able to say I'm heavily involved with one of those
alternatives.

Harv
Xref: sparky comp.sys.amiga.datacomm:5423 comp.dcom.modems:11317