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Sun, 13 Feb 1994 22:58:55 +0100 |
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Message of Sun,
13 Feb 1994 19:50:42 GMT from LISTSERV give-and-take forum
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On Sun, 13 Feb 1994 19:50:42 GMT "John W. Redelfs"
<[log in to unmask]> said:
>I would die for a chance to run my two lists under Revised Listserv.
>Unfortunately, I am not a computer person.
There are many people in your situation, and the good news is that L-Soft
is working on it and will "soon" be able to offer this kind of service to
the hundreds or possibly thousands of people who need a mailing list to
get their work done, don't know anything about computers, don't have
access to an IBM mainframe, and get utterly confused by the unix systems
the people at the computing centre said they had to use to run the list.
This is a relatively new problem in fact, not because of the decline of
mainframes but because in the 80s these people wouldn't have used a
mailing list at all. They didn't have a PC on their desk; they had heard
about e-mail and possibly used it a few times, but their professional
community hadn't reached critical mass, or maybe it wasn't organized
enough, anyway there was no structure or point of focus to draw their
interest. They'd use e-mail occasionally, for instance to contact a
student spending a year abroad, but not in their everyday work.
Anyway what these people want is either an easy-to-use package that will
run on their PC, with a simple graphical interface, or then get their
grant to pay someone to run the list for them and take care of all the
computer stuff. They're not really interested in buying the unix version
of LISTSERV because they'd still have to deal with obfuscated error
messages from mailers all over the world, and of course they'd still have
to deal with unix itself, which they don't understand. And there isn't
going to be a HELP button one can click on :-) Even in purely economical
terms, it is more cost-effective to pay a computer person to run the list
than to teach them how to do it themselves, and it is cheaper than buying
even an inexpensive unix workstation. Actually I expect that this service
will have a much bigger impact on the unix list managers than the unix
version of LISTSERV.
Eric
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