Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Path: utzoo!lsuc!jmm
From: jmm@lsuc.on.ca (John Macdonald)
Subject: Re: modem/serial news and mail readers
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 90 04:27:19 GMT
Message-ID: <1990Dec18.042719.1383@lsuc.on.ca>
References: <1990Dec14.225113.14671@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Dec15.031953.24134@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>

In article <1990Dec15.031953.24134@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> resnick@cogsci.uiuc.edu (Pete Resnick) writes:
>
>For mail, you have no problem. Eudora, by Steve Dorner here at UIUC,
>can work over a serial line using the Communications Toolbox. I would
>speak to him to see if you can do it over a modem here, but I think
>you can.
>
>News and other things are a more interesting problem. Remember that
>things like news run using the TCP/IP network protocol to communicate
>with the server.

There is nothing about news that requires TCP/IP.  The original news
software was designed to run using modem and uucp connections.  The
more recent variants have added support for using the NNTP protocol
over TCP/IP networks to the previous functionality, but in no way
has the capability of using non TCP/IP connections been lost.  There
is no reason that it would not be possible to run news from a Mac.
However, this does not mean that I am claiming that it has been done,
just that it could.  It would be done using a few background Multi
Finder programs - one to run the modem and the UUCP protocol, and a
second to process News batches after they were received.  Another
foreground program could be used to read the news after it was
received.  Perhaps, it would be possible to use Eudora as a basis
for the modem/uucp portion, and then it would (just :-) be a matter
of porting the news batch processing to the Mac - anybody got a few
spare months?
