On Sat, 19 Sep 1992 19:37:25 EST Murph Sewall <SEWALL@UCONNVM> said:
>I typically run CMS in a window on a Macintosh. I've done so using a Mac
>Plus with a nine inch screen. Given a terminal program on the Mac that
>handles hardware handshaking one can crank up a file transfer, hide the
>terminal window in the background, and do anything except format a
>floppy disk (I think Apple's next system update is supposed to make such
>tasks cohabit better with background tasks) without disrupting the
>transfer.
That is the Internet/unix approach - you create a problem out of
laziness, religious bigotry or plain oversight, and then claim it does
not exist because it can be solved by cheap hardware (in the US). Sure,
with a workstation you can easily fire up several windows and have that
many FTP sessions running in parallel, and workstations are getting
cheaper and cheaper. Ok, let's say a SPARC was the same price as my dumb
terminal. I still have to see a legitimate justification for why I should
have to open a window, start a FTP session, wait for the prompt, type a n
o n y m o u s (a word that was chosen for its combined brevity and ease
of typing), wait for the prompt, type any obscene word containing an
@-sign to make the stupid server happy, then a CD command, then decide
that the file has to be transferred in binary, type BINARY, then GET, and
then get back to my business after some rodent relocation business.
What does this state-of-the-art procedure give me as compared to my
stone-age one-line command, which furthermore never needs to be restarted
because there is no potential for forgetting binary mode or losing the
connection? Not even speed. With FTP, the file takes 2 minutes to arrive,
with BITNET it takes 3, let's say even 5 to be nice. So what? I don't
care, I have started a new mail message meanwhile, as long as it has
arrived when I am done I will be happy. And why would I want to send a
package to someone whose login password I don't even know? Ah, this must
be for security reasons - by requiring me to know the password of people
working on the same programming project as me, my correspondents can rest
assured that they will not receive viruses from people who lack the
privileges to run them on their own account ;-)
Eric
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