Over the years there has been much discussion about switching
the bionet groups to a strictly USENET distribution system. As it is now
the bionet groups are distributed both via Usenet AND as mailing lists
to individuals' e-mailboxes. There are many inherent problems in distributing
the groups via e-mail, mail loops, full mail spools from users who don't read
there mail for awhile, the need to sort through ones mailbox constantly - which
can be quite tedious ..... USENET solves many of these problems BUT adds a
problem of its own - the need to have USENET access. It can be very difficult
for the average user to get USENET access if their site doesn't
have it already - as it entails talking a sys-op into taking on a somewhat
time consuming project of getting a Newsfeed and the appropriate software
(NNTP or whatever) installed and allocating it a pretty sizable chunk of disk
space. Many sys-ops resist such requests ....
When I had the good fortune to be able to switch over to USENET I really saw
what I had been missing. Not only do I not have the mailbox problems of before
but there are some 3000+ different newsgroups on USENET - covering just about
everything under the sun - which one may choose to read or not to read :-)
Some time in the last year or so it was suggested that the bionet groups go
strictly to USENET in 1995 (around a three year warning period). This was
fine for me as I have USENET access etc... but I thought of all the folks who
get it by e-mail who would be shut out and felt like there should be a solution
for them too. There are of course public access sites which on can telnet
into like the CLeveland Freenet etc... and read USENET - but a much better
option would be a client system that one could use from their own machine, save
articles they want to keep and leave the others. There are of course the
WAIS source for the bionet group which one can search (from WAIS or Gopher)
but that doesn't help those who want to read the articles daily. Well now
the "USENET client" exists - it's good old GOPHER. There is now a gopher
site(s?) which carrys the full USENET distribution. This is a fairly nice
solution as there are gopher clients for most of the operating systems/machines
that folks have available - Unix, X-Windows, VMS, PC (DOS), Mac, MVS, CMS.
Thus people can install a gopher client on their own account - or if they wish
ask their sys-op to install it for everyone (a trivial job compared to setting
up a USENET site).
The GOPHER site from which you can access USENET is
gopher.msu.edu, port 70
So if you have gopher on you system just type
gopher gopher.msu.edu <RETURN>
You will see the top menu:
-> 1. About Gopher/
2. Michigan State University/
3. Internet Resources/
4. Internet Libraries/
5. News/
6. Phone Books/
7. Other Gophers/
8. Weather/
Choose number 5 (and hit <RETURN>) and you will see the News directory:
--> 1. Daily Texan/
2. Minnesota Daily/
3. NASA News/
4. National Weather Service/
5. Recent Earthquakes.
6. USA Today Decisionline (sample)/
7. USENET News/
Choose number 7 (and hit <RETURN>) and you will see the USENET News directory.
--> 1. About Gopher USENET.
2. What is USENET ?.
3. alt/
4. bionet/
5. bit/
6. biz/
7. clari/
8. comp/
9. control/
10. cscw-implementors/
11. ddn/
12. general/
13. gnu/
14. junk/
15. local/
16. mi/
17. misc/
18. msu/
19. news/
20. rec/
21. sci/
22. soc/
23. talk/
24. to/
25. unix-pc/
Choose number 4 (and hit <RETURN>) and you will see the bionet directory.
--> 1. agroforestry/
2. announce/
3. biology/
4. general/
5. genome/
6. immunology/
7. info-theory/
8. jobs/
9. journals/
10. molbio/
11. neuroscience/
12. plants/
13. politics/
14. population-bio/
15. sci-resources/
16. software/
17. technology/
18. users/
19. xtallography/
and so on ....
If you don't have a gopher client you can get one by anonymous ftp from
boombox.micro.umn.edu (134.84.132.2) in the pub/gopher directory and
subdirectories. Bionet's own Don Gilbert has also written a Gopher client
for the Mac called GopherApp which you can ftp from ftp.bio.indiana.edu
(129.79.224.25) in the util/gopher/gopherapp/ directory.
If your site has USENET and you would like to set up a gopher server with
which people can read USENET in order to distribute the load geographically
- ie one in Europe (Finland or Switzerland? :-), one in Japan, Israel ....
you can obtain the code to do so by anonymous ftp from ftp.msu.edu (35.8.2.41)
as /pub/unix/news/gnews.tar.Z.
Now if people can access the bionet groups via USENET and Gopher I think it will
be easier to make the transition away from e-mail distribution. However one
could still post to the newsgroups via e-mail if they were reading by gopher.
The remaining hurdle are those people who are only on BITNET, as gopher will
only work over the Internet. I'm curious - Dave can you tell what % of the
readers are accessing through BITNET from your last reader survey?
Sincerely,
Dan Jacobson
