Subj : Re: Analog modems in the digital age. To : mark lewis From : James Digriz Date : Fri Apr 06 2018 07:35 am mark lewis wrote to James Digriz: ml> ml> in today's world, the mailers operate, mostly, on their own port (24554 ml> default for binkp) and so there's no real need for the old style front end ml> mailer sharing the same port as the BBS... it can still be done, though... ml> i do it here with my frontdoor/remoteaccess setup running on OS/2... there ml> are not very many systems out there doing this so there's not much mail ml> being transferred over telnet mailer connections... the majority of ml> today's systems are using binkd or have a mailer that offers the binkp ml> protocol... ml> ml> i don't know if that answers your question(s) or not... hopefully it does ml> help some... ml> ml> )\/(ark Right, and I'm familiar with most of that. I remember for instance making a TI S1500 (an old SVR3.3 32-bit Unix system without the available ethernet card) accessible via telnet 15-20 years ago or so. So I'm not a stranger at that sort of thing. It's not too hard to make a strictly digital connection of some kind, or to convert IP to serial connections. You can fake dial-up, too. On the retro 4.3BSD UUCP network that Warren Toomey of tuhs.org set up, we've used his tcpdial perl script for this. You could use a flatfile like a nodelist for this, or use a distributed or shared database. I probably wasn't clear enough, though. The problem I'm looking at is going from serial connections to analog and back, on both ends, over the PSTN, when there is no copper, analog, or TDM. Where there is no POTS, only fiber, only IP data networking underlying everything. It's not clear to me that such use of voice phone lines will be univerally available. With or without the "repeal" of "Net Neutrality", the economics appear to disencentive support for analog data. Why would you still want to do this? Well, consider that the 2015 FCC decision exempted dial-up ISPs (or BBS'es, if you stretch things, especially if they route outside their local network) from the Net Neutrality regulations, some of which were both onerous, and offensive to 1st amendment sensibilities. May or may not be a moot point now, but it could come up again easily enough. Beyond that, analog is still a good choice for some applications and some media. Greetings, James Digriz email: jbdigriz@bbs.dragonsweb.org --- MBSE BBS v1.0.7.4 (GNU/Linux-x86_64) * Origin: DragonsWeb Labs (1:123/755) .