Presidential Ramblings

I miss CompuServe. Remember when being “online” meant subscribing to an online service? CompuServe competed with services like “The Source” and a weird service for Apple users called AOL and beat them all until their own management gave up and sold their soul to AOL. CompuServe was the best because they had the best software. The heart of the any service was the places where members could interact with each other. On CompuServe, this was called a “forum.” - sponsored by some company or organization as a place to go to ask questions and discuss some specific subject area. At one point Microsoft had ten, maybe fifteen forums with topics organized by product. So there was a forum for DOS, Windows (one for each flavor), databases, Office, etc, etc. Every major software company had one or more forums on CompuServe.

The forum software on CompuServe was, believe it or not, originally written by the users themselves, and had two key features: all messages were threaded, so you could easily follow the “thread” of the conversation, and you were notified, when you entered a forum, of any new messages addressed to you. The forum software even remembered the last message you read, so you could start where you left off, when you returned. No wonder people felt they “belonged” to a forum!

You paid for CompuServe by the minute. As I recall, it cost $12 per hour (maybe more) to connect at 1200bps back in the 80’s. People with deep pockets could connect at 9600bps for about $30 per hour— more than we pay for a month of Internet service today! Obviously, this was an impediment to extensive use of the service, so users wrote scripting programs that did everything for you. At the press of a key, Tapcis (my favorite) would dial the modem, log on, go to each selected forum, capture any waiting messages, download the subject line of all new messages, and log off—all much faster than you could ever do it manually. A second pass would capture any messages you selected to read.

Ok, let’s review. I liked CompuServe because I never missed a message—I could find answers, or at least find where to ask the question quickly and easily. Once I asked, finding the answer was as easy as coming back to where I had asked it. The forum software made sure you found your messages. Of course, there was a search facility that made it easy to look thru the questions (message subject lines) already on the forum, since someone else may have already asked the same question. In that case, the answer you need just might be there as well. And all of this was done in plain old ASCII text.

So why can’t I do this in the “news groups” on the Internet today? Today we have Windows, with an easy to use GUI (yes, we have Linux, too). There must be some easy to use “news readers” available somewhere. Perhaps you know of one. If you do, please point me in the right direction.
What happened to CompuServe? Well, it’s still around (www.compuserve.com) and has a truly excellent web-based user interface for the old forums. This interface was in development prior to the sale to AOL, but as it was implemented, AOL was busy driving the users away. Today, subject areas that were covered by five forums have been contracted into one. For instance, the old Windows NT Forums now covers Win2k, XP and Server 2003 without any updating of the message or library sections. Last time I checked, it appeared that the UNIX Forum is gone, leaving the Linux Forum to cover both areas. Some of the forums still have a cadre of dedicated sysops who answer questions. Unfortunately, the users who interacted and answered each others questions are also mostly gone. Even worse, the community is gone. Years ago people would “hang out” in the discussion sections of many of the forums. There were people I considered friends in several forums even though I never met them in person.

I ran a forum for FUSE, the FOCUS Users Group from 1990 until 1999 when CompuServe forced us to close. FOCUS is a database product from Information Builders Inc. (IBI). In 1990, most FOCUS users were on mainframes. Over the years, IBI produced versions for UNIX, VAX, the PC (DOS and Windows), and just about every other platform you can name. The FUSE Forum, together with the forums run by IBI, answered thousands of questions, but it was impossible for a pay as you go service to compete with “free” email, as more and more companies connected their email systems to the Internet. So our members moved to an email list on the Internet. Maybe it wasn’t entirely AOL’s fault!

MyDoom

Are you tired of hearing about the MyDoom worm? Well, you’re going to hear a lot more about it, unless everyone patches their Windows. A new DoomJuice.B worm uses the ‘back door’ left by MyDoom and even corrects the coding mistakes in DoomJuice.A! These worms use your machine to launch a denial of service attack on Microsoft. It’s only a matter of time before a variant is released that uses your machine to relay SPAM, and we certainly don’t need any more of that.

There are four things you can do to protect your machine from almost all worms and viruses (1) run an antivirus program and keep it up to date, (2) keep your Windows patched, and (3) use a firewall. The fourth item is to never open any email attachment that you are not expecting. If you receive an attachment from someone you know, send them a quick email asking if they really sent the attachment. It could save you a lot of work cleaning up your machine later. These malware programs would not be such a problem, if everyone applied the patches as soon as they become available.

Jim Scheef
dacsprez@dacs.org

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