[ih] Obscure e-mail systems

[Bernie Cosell]

It's not really worth mentioning other than that it was such a kludge: 
when we moved down to the farm there was *NO* internet access at all [not 
even AOL dialup!!  This was in 1992].   I did have a dial-in account in 
Brookline [at world.std.com] but that was a long distance call.  UGH!   
At the time I had an Amiga here at home.   It had a reasonable email 
client on it.

SO: I got all my email at world.  I then wrote a progam on the Amiga that 
would dial into World and Zmodem down my pending email, and dump it into 
the right place so my Amiga client would think that email had arrived.  
Outgoing email was put into a queue and I also wrote a program to 
'execute' things on the World system [like FTPs and such] -- it added 
those commands to the outbound email queue.  Then I'd run my 'send' 
program that'd zmodem upload all the outgoing stuff and kick off a Unix 
script that'd parse the file and do what needs doing [posting emails, 
grabbing files, whatever].   That worked for several years until there 
was a local ISP I could dial into and then I could just do POP/SMTP email 
like all the other dialin users.  but the long-distance dialing stuff was 
really fun -- a bit reminiscent of how CSNET worked.   Also inexpensive: 
it was remarkably quick for my program to dial into world, do its 
business and hang up.

   /Bernie\

-- 
Bernie Cosell                     Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:bernie at fantasyfarm.com     Pearisburg, VA
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