Subj : Re: Analog modems in the digital age.
To : mark lewis
From : James Digriz
Date : Fri Apr 06 2018 07:35 am
mark lewis wrote to James Digriz:
<cut much useful info>
ml>
ml> in today's world, the mailers operate, mostly, on their own port (24554
ml> default for binkp) and so there's no real need for the old style front end
ml> mailer sharing the same port as the BBS... it can still be done, though...
ml> i do it here with my frontdoor/remoteaccess setup running on OS/2... there
ml> are not very many systems out there doing this so there's not much mail
ml> being transferred over telnet mailer connections... the majority of
ml> today's systems are using binkd or have a mailer that offers the binkp
ml> protocol...
ml>
ml> i don't know if that answers your question(s) or not... hopefully it does
ml> help some...
ml>
ml> )\/(ark
Right, and I'm familiar with most of that. I remember for instance making a TI
S1500 (an old SVR3.3 32-bit Unix system without the available ethernet card)
accessible via telnet 15-20 years ago or so. So I'm not a stranger at that
sort
of thing. It's not too hard to make a strictly digital connection of some
kind, or to convert IP to serial connections.
You can fake dial-up, too. On the retro 4.3BSD UUCP network that Warren Toomey
of tuhs.org set up, we've used his tcpdial perl script for this. You could use
a flatfile like a nodelist for this, or use a distributed or shared database.
I probably wasn't clear enough, though. The problem I'm looking at is going
from serial
connections to analog and back, on both ends, over the PSTN, when there is no
copper, analog, or TDM. Where there is no POTS, only fiber, only IP data
networking underlying everything. It's not clear to me that such use of voice
phone lines will be univerally available. With or without the "repeal" of "Net
Neutrality", the economics appear to disencentive support for analog data.
Why would you still want to do this? Well, consider that the 2015 FCC decision
exempted dial-up ISPs (or BBS'es, if you stretch things, especially if they
route outside their local network) from the Net Neutrality regulations, some
of
which were both onerous, and offensive to 1st amendment sensibilities. May or
may not be a moot point now, but it could come up again easily enough.
Beyond that, analog is still a good choice for some applications and some
media.
Greetings, James Digriz
email:
[email protected]
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