[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected
> readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in
> charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would
> the internet be like today? Would it all be run by 'the telephone
> company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from
> the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. What do the
> rest of you think? PAT]
The Internet wouldn't be run by the "telephone company." It would be a very limited linkup between universities and defense contractors who could afford to pay for the $1000+ per month 256k high-speed lines needed. The rest of us would still be using the Source, Compuserve, and BIX over dialup, using special utilities to minimize toll call time.
Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD (USA) (Replace "example.invalid" with "com" in my address.)
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: _You_ might be doing that, but I suspect I would be doing like I was around 20-25 years ago: I called into eecs.nwu.edu on my user account there, since it was a local call, then telnetted over to either bu.edu or lcs.mit.edu where I could work in peace. In those days, I was a Unix account collector. I had Unix accounts on several university systems, such as Northwestern, Boston University, Berkeley in California and a couple others. The only one that was local to me (in terms of the telco charges) was Northwestern University in Evanston, where I had an account on alpha.eecs.nwu.edu (which was also known as alpha.nwu.bitnet). After Bill Pfieffer started his rec.radio.broadcasting newsgroup using the University of Illinois at Chicago computers, he got for me an account on uics.edu as well, and I traded to him one of my accounts at Berkeley; a machine known these days as remarque.org but back then it was (something).berkeley.edu . I suspect I would get along okay.
Admittedly I would not spend the _hours_ each day logged into massis I do now. I prefer (or did prefer, before my own brain got so scrambled up) to use a shell in my work -- preferably tc-shell or c-shell (I use tc-shell and emacs in putting this Digest together each day (along with various other scripts) and whenever I have reason to chat with an ISP, one of my first questions to them is 'if I place my account with you, can I have a shell to work with and use my scripts?' Their answer is always no, so that ends the discussion. PAT]