Reader Mail

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                               Reader Mail
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From: Nick Christie <nmc@dircon.co.uk>
Subject: AR410 Letters: Value of a PPP connection

Hi Jason,

I write in response to the letter from Rob Knop in the Reader's Mail
section of Amiga Report 410, in which he promotes the use of a Unix shell
account, particularly for email:

1.  Ease of use: while a shell account may be easier to set up than, say,
AmiTCP, you won't have the familiarity of Amiga-style GUI-based software.

2.  Speed: With a shell account, you cannot download your email in a minute
or two and read/respond off-line.  When browsing the web, you can turn off
the downloading of graphics, while still maintaining the option to retrieve
them if you wish.  As for the behaviour of Lynx, I do not believe it
retrieves only one screen- full of text at a time.  In any case, almost all
graphical web browsers display text as it is received; you do not have to
wait.

3.  Availability: A shell account is extremely accessible, but a PPP
account can be reached from any machine running a PPP client.  The only
drawback is that your messages will end up residing on that machine's hard
disk.

And I would add a fourth point:

4.  File transfers are simpler across a PPP connection, allowing you to
download direct to your Amiga using a native FTP client.  With a shell
account, you would have two transfers to deal with, for example, FTP to the
account, followed by ZModem to your Amiga.

Nick

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From: intrepid@netpass.com (Chuck Joslin)
Subject: Amigas at Disney

Jason,

As a former member of a long since departed Amiga dealer in Orlando, I can
add to your story about the Indiana Jones Amigas.  The Amiga 2000 is also
used at the MGM theme park here in Orlando to control fireworks displays. 
We repaired the machine used there and sold them a backup unit back in the
1989 time-frame.

Another prominent user of the Amiga in Orlando is the Orlando Arena and the
Orlando Magic Shak-less NBA team.  Back in the Magics 2nd year in the
league, I (along with two staff members), used 2 Amigas (an A2500 and a
Toaster equipped A2000 (with a GVP 33MHz '030 board) to produce the
graphics on the Arena JumboTron.  We did six or seven games before
convincing the city and the team to purchase machines for the video
production room at the Arena.  These machines are still in use today.

Last year I formed a new company (Intrepid Communications, Inc.) which
sells Computer Telephony solutions to business, business phone systems, an
inhouse line of Pentium machines, UMAX SuperMac MacOS machines and
hopefully, if the situation improves, new generation Amigas.

We are in the process of becoming NewTek resellers (for all platforms) and
are already SoftLogik dealers.

Best wishes in your new relationship with VisCorp and kudos for producing
Amiga Report so well for so long.  We have every issue stored on our A4000
here in our office.

BTW: we will soon have our new WebSite up on line.  (URL:
http://www.intrepidcomm.com) Be sure to drop in for a visit.

Chuck Joslin
President
Intrepid Communications, Inc.

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