> > The question has arisen among academic librarians attending continuing
> > education/summer courses and conferences at other sites as to how they may
> > keep in touch with home base electronically if they 1) lack an account with
> > a commercial service and their home base offers no 800 number and also if
> > they 2) lack a portable machine with a modem.
> >
> There are many differences depending on the technology at home and away.  The
> best possible situation that I have found, is that at the away facility there
> is a public terminal room which will allow me to telnet back to my home
> system.  I would recommend that users obtain accounts on commercial systems,
> e.g. mcimail, compuserv.  Most times accessing these services requires only a
> local call and finding a friend with a computer and modem is fairly easy thes
> days.  The commercial services are not very expensive for a few months' use.
 
No, *not* MCIMail or CompuServe, unless there's something else you
need them for.  CompuServe is *horrendously* expensive if you don't
use special (Non-CompuServe) software on whatever machine you're
calling in with.  MCIMail is basically just that; mail.
 
And neither CompuServe nor MCI let you telnet to other machines.
 
One *cheap* commercial (actually, non-profit) service that *does* do
this is the Well (try [log in to unmask]; if that's not an address
then use [log in to unmask]).  The Well lets you telnet, ftp,
etc., and has dialups in most U.S. cities.  (The Well is the Whole
Earth 'Lectronic Link, a multiprocessor Sequent Dynix (Unix) machine
that's run by the same organization which brought us the Whole Earth
catalogs so long ago...)
 
(Anti-Disclaimer: I have accounts on all three of these systems.
CompuServe I keep for the software libraries and single-point access
to Dialog and other databases (any ideas on this?), MCIMail I keep
for their slightly better paper mail facility, and the Well I keep for
the Internet access.  Mail and news go through my own usenet node, a
PC running Waffle; definitely the way to go if you're a list owner
who has to pay for your own access.)
 
Steve
 
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* Steve Traugott                                                    *
* [log in to unmask]                                 *
* [log in to unmask] List Manager                                    *
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