response 25 of 78:

Sep 3 23:25 UTC 1995

Re #20:
    I don't want connections to be priced that way, either. What I meant to
say was, consider the cost per kilobit/sec of *capacity*, and I believe a
comparison like this is feasible. To wit, a connection that can pass a million
bits per second is 10 times more valuable than one that can only pass 100,000.
It will allow 10 times as many people online at once, and it would stand to
reason, including 10 times as many with member or patron status. I would not
expect any shortage of users, paying or otherwise, to fill that capacity.

response 27 of 78:

Sep 5 07:56 UTC 1995

Actually, I'd put that as "unbelieveable" for the T1, and "INCONCEIVEABLE"
for the T3...  :-)

response 29 of 78:

Sep 5 19:36 UTC 1995

   Heh.  OK selena, I can give you some figures that will be somewhat
inaccurate, as they are about 8 months old.  I haven't gone Internet
window shopping for a while.  An ISDN connection at 128Kbps is about
$500 a month for the cost of the connection itself, plus $60 a month
for two ISDN phone lines.  A T1 connection at 1.544Mbps (million bits
per second) is about $1100; A T3 connection at 45Mbps is somewhere in
the vacinity of $6000 a month.

   Of course, haggling is an important part of negociating a T1 or T3
connection.  I've heard *wildly* varying prices for both of them.
Suffice it to say that a T3 connection is not feasable, but a T1 could
well be, depending how much more we grow, and how good we might get
at catching the interest of some company or other corporate entity
that would like to get some exposure in cyberspace by underwriting
a connection.

   I didn't mention the hardware costs involved in getting one of 
those three conections, either.  For an ISDN line, its the cheapest
at around $600 or less for an ISDN card, although I'm not sure that
UNIX's there are out there that have the driver software for one.  That
is almost certainly going to be less of a problem in the future, as
more places get ISDN, hence more op systems will have ISDN abilities.  A
T1 interface, used is still several grand.

response 31 of 78:

Sep 5 22:02 UTC 1995

   The price of T1's may well have come down.  It was the case,
many years ago that a T1 was *really* expensive, like $5000/month
in the mid 80's.  So they are becomming more affordable.  Remember,
we're seeing the infancy of digital communications links.  They
will become cheaper as time goes by.  If you're old enough, remember
back the mid 60's, when gettin a long-distance call was still
something of a rarity, and you had to use an operator to place
one.  As routing technology got better, and faster systems like
sattellites came about, the prices started their 30 year plunge.
   And so it will be with net connections.

response 33 of 78:

Sep 5 23:45 UTC 1995

   I would be willing to negociate with the person over a wide
number of things to get a Tn connection.  But having them stay
anonymous to Grex would raise my hackles a bit--I think that
sorrid little part of me that casts a wary eye at things would
keep on jumping up and down in my head, asking why this would
be so.

response 35 of 78:

Sep 6 03:40 UTC 1995

That is an interesting question, Mary. I hope we are given the opportunity
to discuss it seriously.

response 37 of 78:

Sep 7 17:04 UTC 1995

   Certainly most of our members are local.  Yes, more people stay
away from the conferences than participate, but I'm not sure if this
wouldn't have been true had Grex ramped up and bought a bunch of
dialin lines.  Party was never popular on Grex until a critical
mass of users was acheiveable, which we couldn't do with 5 lines.
Now that we have ports, people who like party can tell their
friends to meet them on party, and it isn't surprising that such
people could become the predominant set of users on the system.

   The other problem is that with Grex being so slow, party is one
of the more usable programs here.  PicoSpan isn't bad about CPU
usage, but effectively, party seems faster to people.  So we've
been "selecting" for party over just about everything else.  With
the additional CPU of the Sun-4 hopefully we can start making the
system more useful to people who want to do other things.

   Agreed about reliability being of the utmost concern.

response 39 of 78:

Sep 7 18:21 UTC 1995

And post little snappy adverts in party, like "Like to party? Support
Grex by becoming a member."  

response 41 of 78:

Sep 7 21:17 UTC 1995

Tell them to enter     fixseen    at the first Ok: prompt, and then leave
to come back the next day. No cf is intimidating that way. I think
they should all be started that way by default.

response 43 of 78:

Sep 8 04:34 UTC 1995

Don't forget that we have another fund-raising possibility...e-mail wolfmage
for the details.

response 45 of 78:

Sep 8 05:30 UTC 1995

(I did have a somewhat unformed thought that posting ads in party is
consistent with the mileau - and the audience probably has the least
percentage of current members.)

response 47 of 78:

Sep 8 15:58 UTC 1995

good idea ajax, I would use it in party for ya rane...

response 49 of 78:

Sep 8 18:05 UTC 1995

<smile>