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