I've used Prodigy since just shortly after it went online, maybe 6 or 7
years ago.  Over that period I've used it anywhere from very little (just
banking and stock quotes) to quite a lot (conferencing, reference
materials, news, weather, etc.).  And over the years I've watched Prodigy
change in response to market pressure by offering new and expanded
services.  But today I tried, for the first time, their Usenet News reader
and I was blown away. 

It's fast, easy to use, and does not in any appear to restrict 
available groups to suit a "family-style" agenda.  The binaries
are there.  Alt.sex.bestiality.hamsters.duct-tape is there as well as
rec.music.classical and rec.food.cooking.low-fat.    

Soon they'll be adding a World Wide Web browser.  Internet mail has been
onboard for a while now.  Anyhow, for those who haven't taken a look in a
good long while you might want to take another peek.  I'm finding that
even though I could do most of this through my MTS account or on Grex
that it's still worth the few extra dollars a month for a Prodigy 
subscription just for the reliability and convenience.  

How is AOL doing in regards to Internet services?

64 responses total.

   Interesting.  What Grex and all the other systems like us need, is
some sort of a front end program for the PC/Mac platforms that make for
a reasonable display system.
   If Prodigy really does keep things open, then they'll do pretty well.
Mary, do me a favor, would you?  Sometime, send me mail here with a
sample of Carlin's "Dirty Words"?  I'd like to see if they still filter
outgoing mail.

AOL has had the 'net mail for ages; also has the net groups, too. I'm
not at all familiar with the Web, so I haven't looked for it, because,
since I don't know what it is, I don't know what it can do for
me. And thus, I haven't explored any other options! Though I do know AOL's
been working hard in expanding alot of their services...

re #1:  I've been saying that we need an easier to use interface
ever since Grex got started!!!

   Well, you're right of course.  All we need now is for someone to
put some time into this.

        A gui front end would be wonderful, esp. for us Mac users!

   Espically for Mac folks?  You're being platformchauvinistic. ;-)

AOL has exploded onto the market recently. I have like 3,000,000 of their
promo 10 hours free diskettes. Their new interface is beautiful. I haven't
worked with it at all since I am not a member but I've seen it.
As far as the Grex interface goes I have a few questions (Don't I always)...
How much would a graphic interface cost Grex? Would the membership fees
skyrocket? Is there a way the members could get together and get a graphic
interface for Grex? If it came to the point where the validations 
skyrocketted then I would think it should be an option. I like Grex
because it's the one place on the net where us poor people can get full
net access. I couldn't afford much more than 6.00$/mth. And what's
the deal with Mac users? How differant is the Mac interface for Grex?
I used a friends Mac on Grex and noticed nothing differant.

Oh, swell.  After years, we're finally getting ready to cancel our Prodigy
account since it gives us at a cost what I can get for free at the

University.  And most of my good friends there have drifted off it for
various reasons.  I _always_ seem to leave a party just as it's getting
good. :-)

Well, roz, before you leave for good just take a look at their Usenet
reader and let me know what you think.  I've only used RN and TIN and
both were cumbersome and far more difficult to configure.

Grex is not in competition with Prodigy.

I think that the cumbersomeness of tin on Grex was due mainly to the
slowness of grex and its internet link rather than tin itself.  I use
tin on a reasonably fast system (emunix) and find it preferable to the
Prodigy news interface, although that opinion is based on only one
quick look at news on Prodigy.  Tin appears to do a better job of
threading articles, for one thing.

Considering Prodigy's past history of screening bulletin board entries
and mail, it's astonishing to me that Prodigy is carrying all the
newsgroups (including the 'alt' ones) without restriction.  This in-
cludes some of the 'binaries' groups that are used to distribute
graphic images, something Grex decided a while ago to stop doing
because of possible copyright violations.

I thought that usenet was the "news" that hasn't been working on grex fo
r so many months, according to the MOTD (OK, well maybe it hasn't been 
months, I don't remember).  I tried using trn once, and it took forever at
2400 baud to read just a list of newsgroups, but that's probably where I
would want to start.  I finally gave up.  Does such a list exist where I
can download it?  I am very interested in usenet, but have never been able
to get into it due to time and grex restraints.  Now that I am hunting for
work I have more time .;..

Me too. I've always wanted to  join usenet.

What is MOTD? And I think it has been down for months, because I've been on
for three months and I don't remember it ever working.

motd is "*m*essage *o*f *t*he *d*ay", and is a file that gets displayed
automatically when you log in.  It's what's been announcing that news is
down for all this time.

News had been somewhat flaky for a while, but has been totally down since
soon after the new disk began its erratic behaviors.

Usenet News used to work great on Grex. Then we opened up the internet link,
and once the traffic became heavy, we were never able to keep the link up
to the newfeed with any consistency. It kept timing out because of the
lag introduced by the excessive traffic on the link, and our router's inability
to deal with that traffic reliably enough. At that point we
had news working, but the feed was spotty and lots of article were being
lost.

More recently, the news disk was taken over by staff, shutting news off
altogether. This disk was being used to help deal with the ongoing disk crisis.
The plan is to return it to news service.

There is a plan to get a better router. It is possible that news can be
restored based on that (and getting the news disk back), but it is likely
to make the netlag far worse than it is now.

There is another plan (better, I think, but it will cost more money) to set
up a separate line to provide a uucp connection to a newsfeed, and possibly
to have news maintained on a separate cpu from Grex. The result of this
plan coming to fruition should be an exceptionally good restoration of
Usenet news service. I hate to predict how long this'll take. A qualified
volunteer to work on this would probably make a big diffference.

re #13:  rotfl!

What's the differance between trn and rn? And how can you post to newsgroups
using e-mail?

I just got my Compuserve magazine (I joined a month or two ago to help with 
my job search) and it says all I have to do there is type "Go Usenet" to get
full access to -- get this -- all *8,500* news groups!  I had heard numbers
like 4,000, and lately 6,000, but 8,500 is incredible.  This is going to be
daunting but fun!

trn presents articles in terms of discussion threads, whereas rn just
presents them in chronological order.  With trn you can select which
threads you do and don't want to read, and then only read those articles,
regardless of their chronological ordering in the newsgroup.

As for your second question, there are mail-to-news gateways where you
send mail to post-<newsgroup> or a similar address.  I'm not sure how to
use any of them, or any more specifics.

In theory (practice is unsubstantiated as yet), email postings
to:    exact.name.of.newsgroup.usenet@decwrl.dec.com   will get
the posting made.
  
Guess I cold have said,   <news.group.name>.usenet@decwrl.dec.com  which
might have been clearer - anyway, there are both descriptions.

  Ugh.  Just what we need.  I hear the link modei squealing.

Bandwidth control by obscurity, STeve?  Hmmm...

   No, just that people now have another way of overloading
Grex.  As this is only one of 16,777,532,413 ways to do this,
there is lots of room for improving the overload factor here. ;-)

Damn...we'd better turn off e-mail...

That's not even mentioning that most mail-news gateways don't allow
crossposting, and thus tend to pollute USENET as well as potentially
polluting the link somewhat (probably not too big a problem, unless
some dweeb user buys Canter & Siegel's book and decides to use Grex
to spam.)

   Or, if C&S decide to use Grex.  I mean, after all, we're free--right?

Yeh, but ..... can't send them email to tell them about it ...<g>.

Mary,

I've been using AOL to read newsgroups for many months now...from when
the serious problems  with News cropped up here.  AOL has added FTP (with
a graphic interface) and are working on WWW. IT's available, but labeled
as beta-test currently.  AOL costs $2.95/hr, and you can access at speeds
up to 14.4Kbps.  Be sure to stop in the CONNECT Magazine area on AOL 
(keyword CONNECT).

Personally, I've found prodigy's interface to be slow and jerky, while AOL's
is very smooth and intuitive.  AOL now claims to have surpassed CIS in
members, and it's very possible! Their last pr said 1.5million users.  I
haven't used the CIS graphical interface to read newsgroups, yet, so I
don't know how they compare. But, for everyone who's asked me, I've 
steered them to AOL, including my mother, and they're just as happy as can
be.

        Pattie

Wow!  $3/hour???  Doesn't sound like a great deal to me.  ICNet is only
$30/month for unlimited on-line time.

I just ended my *free* two week sample of oeonline over in Livonia. They
have a very nice setup, with news, ftp, lynx etc. Accessable through
Merit, at a variety of speeds. $19.95/month, half that by the year. No
time limits either, so $3.00 sounds like a lot to me too! If I could 
afford it, I'd be over there also.

        re # 30 is that a slip connection?  I.E. can you use gui
applications directly from your home computer over the net (like
mosaic etc).  Second is there a connect time limit something like
15 hours/ month or is that $19.95 for unlimited connect time?

 I tried to read news on Prodigy, but was told that I'm not eligible
because I'm running MS-DOS and they have news set up only for Mac or
Windows.  That's one reason I might be leery of a GUI for Grex:  Would it
lock out some of the present users?  One approaach another Picospan system
may be trying is to develop a GUI front end that talks to the host using
Picospan commands, thus keeping compatibility.  

 But in my attempts to access Usenet on Prodigy, I did get far enough to
see that they had a whole series of warning screens about how there might
be Uncensored Adult Material ahead, and an approval mechanism where the
"A" account holder (presumably Daddy, with Mommy and the kids getting the
"B" through "F" (last letter of ID) accounts) gets to decide who-all in
the family can or can't read news. 

(The "A" account holder in our household is Mommy.  I had to be approved.
Oh the shame, the humiliation...)

I'd like to suggest linking this item to internet.

Oeonline does have slip connections, for an additional $40 hookup charge.
That gets you the software and all.  Last I heard, though, they were having
some trouble with the slip connections, and were advising people not to
choose that yet.

It's a really great system, actually.

Item Agora 30 linked to Internet 77

At one time I had both a Prodigy and AOL account but I found
enough overlap in services that I seldom used AOL.  Mostly, 
I stayed with Prodigy as we do most of our banking online, with
NBD Express, and AOL didn't offer such a thing at the time.  So
after a few months of watching the bill show up without my having
logged in I cancelled my AOL subscription.  

Primarily I now use Prodigy for a couple of conferences, like the bread
machine discussion, where the amount of information is simply amazing,
banking, Usenet, Consumer Reports, Guts, Stock Quotes, some e-mail,
Letterman's Top Ten Lists, and to order flower deliveries.  John has his
own list of what he likes to do.  And the bill for all this is $14.95 per
month.  Very infrequently do we go over that amount by a few dollars. 

I find the service very organized, and quite speedy, despite
the fact we're accessing the service at 9600 baud.  My understanding
is that soon though we'll be able to connect at 14.4.

I noticed you mentioned slips...I really want one, but where do you get one?
What is it? Where does it go on the computer? Is it just a disk or is it
hardware? People always try to explain it but they speak big techy words
and I don't understand them. Please help...I want xwindows and mosaic
real bad.

I too just discovered "Netserve" and thought it was terrific! I'm very 
interested in some understandable answers to peacefrg's questions.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss