Subj : Re: qwk and/or points
To : mark lewis
From : Tony Langdon
Date : Fri Apr 05 2019 06:04 pm
-=> On 04-04-19 20:01, mark lewis wrote to August Abolins <=-
ml> On 2019 Apr 04 18:54:00, you wrote to Alan Ianson:
AA> I could never quite understand why points never seemed to catch the
AA> imagination of message/echomail users in NA.
ml> mostly because of no cost local calls... why be a point when you can
ml> connect to your favorite BBS to read/write messages online as well as
ml> uploading/downloading files and playing some door games... especially
ml> when a lot of systems gave users 60 minutes per day or more and were
ml> also able to offer multiple nodes so more than one user could be online
ml> at a time...
In Australia, we had flat fee untimed local calls, so there were no real
incentives for setting up a point. However, I did run a point for a number of
years. My point was a full blown BBS - in fact, it was a clone of the main RA
BBS, reconfigured as a point. In its day, where my main PC ran 95%+ of mail,
it worked _really_ well. And for those times I wanted to use another device
(most commonly a laptop), I could simply grab a Bluewave packet off the point
and copy it to the laptop.
Today, this doesn't work, because now I have BBSs on site, which fulfil the
role of the point. And mobile devices have very poor offline support
(basically whatever you can cobble together in Magic DOSBox on Android, nothing
on iOS).
ml> users genreally didn't have a problem installing an offline mail
ml> package since it was one program... trying to do the same for the
ml> piece-part point systems available at the time was more problematic...
ml> might as well set up a BBS with a tosser and mailer...
Or spin one off a working BBS, like I did. :)
... There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them
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