On Mon, 15 Nov 1993 19:00:20 CET Gerhard Gonter <[log in to unmask]> said: >The point is if LISTSERV will run on some sort of Unix box, Rice and >many others are simply going to dump their mainframe... Sorry, but this is not what the message said. The decision to dump or not dump an IBM mainframe is usually based on the availability of suitable replacements for the vital administrative software (payroll, student registration, etc) that runs on this machine. If no replacement can be found, the machine stays no matter what. If the administrative work can be moved to a cheaper system, it is very difficult to justify keeping the mainframe just for LISTSERV. LISTSERV is of course one of the reasons people put forward to keep their mainframe, but it's not like all the mainframes in the network have been bought to run LISTSERV, and will be dumped the instant unix list managers become available (they have been available for years). While there are cases like that, they are mostly smaller, old systems (4341, 4381, etc) which have been bought by the university a long time ago and don't cost anything besides power and floor space. What the message said is that it would be too expensive to run LISTSERV if the number of BITNET core sites decreases, or if BITNET goes away, it was not clear. There is no noticeable increase if the number of core site decreases, except of course on the remaining core sites, but that has nothing to do with LISTSERV. If BITNET goes away and people migrate to LISTSERV-TCP/IP, there will be an additional resource cost as SMTP is less efficient than NJE and the data needs to be encoded. But this is nothing like an order of magnitude. Encoding and decoding messages may add some 20-30% to LISTSERV's resource usage. >Is L-Soft also going to implement a (true) Unix listserv sometime in the >future? Yes, this was announced in August. See GM9308-1.PS from [log in to unmask] Eric