> > 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 ********************************************************************* * Steve Traugott * * [log in to unmask] * * [log in to unmask] List Manager * *********************************************************************