response 50 of 75:

Oct 29 02:52 UTC 1995

At one point, it looked like Tagalog would be a good 2nd language for
newuser.

response 52 of 75:

Oct 29 03:36 UTC 1995

   People flock to Grex in clumps.  First an adventuring pioneer
type who scouts around on the net comes by, and sees that they
can do things on Grex.  They tell their not quite as adventurous
friends, and they get on.  Then those folks start telling their
mundane friends and Grex gets a newuserfest from some place.

   This only happened once we were on the net.  The first such
instance of 'digital immagration' came from the UK, at Oxford.
A lot of the staff were really amazed to see 21 people from that
college come onto Grex in one day.  Most of them have left by
now, but at the time it was pretty interesting.

   We had many such waves; each wave was at least 25 people,
sometimes many more.  That I can clearly remember, we've had
immigrations from England, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, the
Phillipines, Thailand, Austrailia in roughly that order.
American waves have included The Citadel, McKendree, Ohio
State and Compuserve.

   I remember the Phillipines clearly, because for some reason
a lot of them liked writing me.  I never minded answering them,
but I always thought it weird, as I've *never* had a helper 
flag on this system.  People just write me anyway, often in
droves.  These people became enamored with the name 'steve'
I guess, becuase one day I had more than 15 people write me.
I didn't do anything else that day.  So I think Marcus is
thinking of that 'invasion', and Tagalong is the language
there.

response 54 of 75:

Oct 29 03:58 UTC 1995

  Wow.  I remember getting three writes at once.  One is easy
to handle.  Two is possible but weird.  Three from people who
use English in a different manner is next to impossible for me
to deal with.

response 56 of 75:

Oct 29 10:30 UTC 1995

It is very entertaining to have these little Grexhistory tidbits
pop up when you least expect them. Thanks for explaining. 

response 58 of 75:

Nov 2 15:56 UTC 1995

        Alright, nice history report, but..
        _Focus_! So, let's start with Spanish then.

response 60 of 75:

Nov 4 07:13 UTC 1995

Well, let's see. If we are going to write a Spanish version of newuser,
we need to go look at the nu.info file that newuser uses to produce its
output. It's nice that the text is all in a separate file.
/usr/noton/nu/nu.info is world readable.

Then someone must translate this. This will be tedious, but we appear to 
have it covered several ways.

Finally, someone has to figure out how to get newuser to use an 
alternate source file, to invoke this variant. 

response 62 of 75:

Nov 5 09:30 UTC 1995

I'm going to pursue teaching newuser about other langauges, but I don't
plan on making it a very high priority, so I don't know when, or even if
it will happen.  A lot will depend on my success in finding translators
- I intend to pursue several possible avenues, to see which works out.
Because of that, I don't even know which language will end up being the
"first".

In order to make this really useful, it would also be useful to think in
terms of converting various other parts of the system to give them
foreign language support.  For instance - "menu" - is only english.
Ditto the web pages.  I don't think that's going to happen all at once,
or suddenly, but I do think it's worth putting some effort into it - if
nothing else, to see if it makes a difference.

response 64 of 75:

Nov 8 06:09 UTC 1995

I volunteer to check the translation for clarity, grammar, etc.

response 66 of 75:

Nov 8 21:41 UTC 1995

Neither is mine, but I allow for this, and check myself very carefully, and
grammar is my strong suit.  :-)

response 68 of 75:

Nov 10 12:12 UTC 1995

I can volunteer to double-check. I need to keep up-to-speed with my Spanish
(it's part of my minor), and I really don't help out enough around here
as it is.

response 70 of 75:

Nov 18 01:34 UTC 1995

        Sorry, no spanish, but "Miller spoken here"! Any takers?

response 72 of 75:

Nov 20 08:25 UTC 1995

fwiw, oneof my older dos-b0xes reads and writes Chinese ... rather well,
in fact, according to a couple of my Chinese friends who have used it.
 
is there (are there) other-than-English fonts for Unix b0xes?

response 74 of 75:

Jan 23 08:14 UTC 1996

ummmm, since my last response an insane Nigerian has destroyed or stolen
everything I own(ed) (with extremely minor exceptions). 
quite glad i was able to get the rehab harware to a safe place first.
  
the software didn't make it, however, Chinese or not.