John Kennedy has some things to say about Bulletin Boards
and the dreaded Information Superhypeway...


Something has been worrying me recently. Something about
comms and modems and all that stuff. It was hard to pin
down, but eventually I got it: Bulletin Boards are boring.
There, I said it, and now that it is out in the open I feel
much better. 

Before you rush to the end of this rant to find my e-mail
address and toast me with a flame, please hear me out and
let me clarify that statement. I don't mean that I think
that Bulletin Boards are dull and tedious by definition, and
used by dull and tedious people with a tenuous grasp of true
social interaction and an unhealty fascinatio of Deep Space
Nine. Far from it, my local board has given me great deal of
enjoyment thanks to the FidoNet system. FidoNet allows me to
meet and chat with other comms enthusiasts from all over the
county, and sometimes further afield. Very few of them are
dull, tedious or socially inadequate -- no more than you
would find amongst non-comms enthusiasts anyway.

Bulletin Boards are boring because they are all based on
very old technology. Extremely old technology -- even older
than the first IBM-PCs, the XT. The first boards were
awesomely slow, text-only systems, on which users had to
register, then log in, then pick options from on- screen
menus by selecting the right keypressed. Once onto the
system, they could look through message and file areas,
struggle with options and maybe get to download stuff.

And what has changed since those first boards? Practially
nothing. I recently watched an inteligent computer literate
adult use a BBS for the first time. It was a board on which
the SysOp had obviously spent a great deal of time trying to
make accessable to new users, but my friend was completely
stuck within minutes.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem. Comms is too damn
difficult.

It's a crazy situation. Look at the Mosaic browser for the World
Wide Web system on the Internet. It's absolutely brilliant
-- click here, click there, colour graphics, sound,
animation. It's the way comms should be: not some archiac
system of ANSI character sets and 80 by 25 column screens.

The World Wide Web works because the pages of information
which make up the text and pictures you see are all based on
special embedded codes called HTML. It's a brilliantly
simply system: you just used codes like <i>this</i> to make
changes to the text style. You want a picture? Easy, add
somthing like this <img scr="picture.gif>.

This is all possible thanks to something called
"Client/Server" systems. The client program runs on your
computer, the server runs on the remote system. Rather than
simply display text sent from the server system, the client
acts intelligently and can display graphics or sounds, or
move icons and windows about. For example, the server might
transmit the code "<b>" and instead of displaying the letter
"B"  the client executes a routine that changes the font
into bold style.

The client/server system takes advantage of the facilities
of the user's computer system. Think about it: the majority
of us have a computer with a 68020 processor or better, four
channel sound and 640 by 256 (or 512) graphics in 256
different colours from a 16 million palette. Why do we put
up with simple text in sixteen shades (which don't even work
half the time)?


Recently I've been working on a system called Balloo which
tries to take the HTML standard and hammers it into a form
that Bulletin Boards can use. The problem is not with the
BBS Host Software, but with a suitable client. To this end
I've been coding a new form of comms terminal for the Amiga.
It looks like anyother, except when text from the BBS host
arrives in HTML format, it is rendered properly. This
includes graphics and buttons which the user can click on:
clicking on a button simply returns a key-press, so the host
system doesn't have to do anything clever. The only changes
the SysOp has to make is to include an HTML option for the
menu screens he has on-line.

There are problems to overcome of course. The Internet was
originally designed on the principle that connection was
never a problem: machines were on-line permanently. If you
have ever seen a really fast internet link running a program
such as Msaic, you'll know what a really smart tool it is,
and how trying to use it with a 14,400 or 28,800 modem link
is really a bit of a joke. Mosaic, and most Usenet news
readers and email systems, are all geared for on-line use:
there is no off-line option for the reason that the
originators were always on-line 100% of the time. Besides,
the World Wide Web works because /all/ the other systems are
on-line and there is so much information to choose from that
trying to make an off-line system is ludicrous.

Unfortunatly in the UK the majority of modem users know that
every second they spend on-line costs them money: and as my
telephone bills will testify, it's not particularly cheap if
you have to use it a lot.

What we need are new tools, specifically tailored to the
needs of the home computer user. Mosaic isn't enough, and a
normal BBS is too limited and down right difficult to use.

So we have to capitalise on the facilities we do have. The
latest modems, the V34 28,800 modems are far from ISDN
links, but they are probably as fast as we can expect to get
down a telephone line and they are getting cheaper. So is
off-line storage -- the other day I got a SCSI2 1 Gigabyte
drive for less than I spent on a drive of only a third of
that capicity a year ago.

We've got fast processors, and great graphics. In theory we
have a terrific platform on which to run a stunning client
system. What can we do about it?

The Balloo project is a start. I know there are system such
as RIP out there, but I feel they are probably no the
direction we should be moving in. If you think you would
like to help, or have any comments please get in touch with
me either by snail-mail through the magazine or via
electronic mail (email: j_kennedy@delphi.com, Fidonet:
2:443/13.4)