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News from:
M V C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , I n c .
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
(603) 429-2223
January 1993
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /news2/pub/mv/inews.
Internet and the Sunday Comics
There was a big stir around our house the other day when we read
the Sunday comics; Dilbert (a character in the strip of the same name,
by Scott Adams) got lost in Cyberspace and wandered the Internet.
"It's beautiful!" says Dilbert, "I'm interacting with the minds of
brilliant people from around the globe. ... How can I ever describe
this to somebody who hasn't been here?" Adams even printed his Inter-
net mail address in the last panel and has also added it to his daily
strip.
We've heard reports that the Internet is being mentioned in pub-
lic places without any accompanying explanation. This is a good sign:
when the New York Times feels it can refer to Internet and assume that
readers know what they are speaking of, progress is being made. On
the other hand, seeing an Internet address in the Sunday Comics rem-
inds us of our first realization that you could buy a computer at Toys
R Us.
The pine mailer
Online in the MV archives is the latest version of the pine
mailer. pine (Pine Is No-longer Elm, although it's probably best not
to think too long about how the names relate, or why they come in tar
files) is built around a callable mail library written by Marc Crispin
(of MM fame, for you old TOPS-20 fans) and a library for an editor
called pico. These things make the pine package interesting from a
number of standpoints. The C-Client and editor libraries give you
callable primitives that you can use in other software. These primi-
tives are meant to be multi-platform, and in fact this package
includes versions (or at least versions-in-progress) for MSDOS, Macin-
tosh, and many other platforms.
The pine mailer itself is intended for novice mail users. It
offers a full-screen curses-based interface, with both an integrated
editor based on the pico library and a standalone pico editor which is
meant to be easy for beginners. pine has a number of configuration
MV Communications, Inc. January 1993
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options and defaults for intelligent mail handling. As an example, at
the beginning of each month pine offers to save your current mailbox
to a file with a name based on the previous month. pine also offers
hooks for MIME (multi-media) mail, so that you can transfer images and
sounds as part of your mail (as long as you have the tools to present
them).
If you would like to experiment with pine, you can fetch it from
the /news2/pub/mail/pine directory on mv; get the file README.MV to
find out about the contents of that directory.
Your Internet and UUCP mail address
Occasionally the question of mail addresses comes up - as in,
"What should I use for my return address?" - and we thought we'd men-
tion it briefly here. Generally it's best to give your Internet
domain address as your primary address, as most people who can send
you mail will be able to use that form, and for most people it is the
best and most reliable. So, for example, Eric Mallett's address at
his machine helio, a member of the .MV.COM domain park, is
ebm@helio.mv.com, and that's what he should give out as his Internet
mail address.
It's also sometimes wise to give out a UUCP path for people who
can't send to Internet addresses. You can generally assume that peo-
ple know how to route UUCP mail to a major Internet gateway, e.g.
uunet, and just give a path from there. Be sure when giving that path
that you use a full domain address as a hop from the Internet gateway,
so that that gateway can use an Internet connection. For instance,
...uunet!helio.mv.com!ebm is fine, as is ...uunet!mv.mv.com!helio!ebm
(the "..." presumes that the sender knows a path to uunet), the point
being that uunet (or an equivalent well-known gateway machine) knows
how to route mail to a valid Internet address. On the other hand,
...uunet!mv!helio!ebm is not good. Since there is no UUCP link from
uunet to mv, uunet would have to calculate a valid UUCP path to reach
mv and deliver the mail, and the mail would arrive via a roundabout
path. And in the general case, you can't rely on the gateway being
able or willing to calculate a good UUCP path for an invalid connec-
tion such as that. Finally, if you need to give a UUCP path to a
specific person, find out from that person what major gateway they can
reach easiest, and apply the above. If, say, they know a short path
to decvax, then Eric might give them the path
...decvax!helio.mv.com!ebm or ...decvax!mv.mv.com!helio!ebm. It can
take some trial and error: not all gateways are equally capable.
SIG group
Those of you who are in an entrepeneurial mode, or even
entrepreneurial mood, may be interested to know of a new group formed
in the Nashua area for support of software enterprises. It's called
the Software SIG (Special Interest Group). The group being fostered
by Mike Ballantine and Forrest Milkowski as an adjunct to their role
MV Communications, Inc. January 1993
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in the Center for Economic Development, and as appropriate to their
own business. The intent of the group is to promote cooperation among
small software businesses, to encourage these businesses, and in gen-
eral to support its members in whatever ways they see fit. Its first
meeting was held at the Chandler Library on January 19, with a presen-
tation by the founders of Nu-Mega Technologies, and with a lively dis-
cussion about the nature of the organization. For more information,
contact Mike at mikeb@world.std.com or (603) 889-2682, or Forrest at
(603) 886-9050, and yes, we think Mike's email address is a little
strange, too.
The Internet Companion
There are several new books about using the Internet. One of
them is The Internet Companion by Tracy LaQuey, with Jeanne C. Ryer.
Jeanne Ryer, we might add, is a New Hampshire resident and a partici-
pant in the NH Network pilot program. In spite of its one glaring
flaw (that it doesn't mention MV Communications), it is a nice intro-
duction to what you can see and do on the Internet. Even though some
of it talks about direct Internet use (telnet, gopher, and such), much
of it does not, dealing with the history of networking, what you can
get out of mail and news, and so forth. It is also filled with side-
bar anecdotes and articles that talk about things going on in and
around the networks: such as Dave Barry's columns, Relcom's networking
in Russia, the Internet Worm, a definition of "hacker." It's a nice
little book and we recommend it quite highly. And it's widely avail-
able: we got ours at the B. Dalton bookstore in the Mall of New
Hampshire.
MV Communications, Inc. January 1993