The work left over from November got pushed onto December, and many of us didn't get any Christmas shopping or chores done until Christmas Eve (at least that's what I told my kids anyway). Here it is Boxing Day and I am just now writing the December Editorial, so what I have done is combined December and January into a single issue.
One of the many things that the phone system fiasco has done is put us behind in our schedule of line expansion. We couldn't gauge the actual requirements (or order more new lines) until we had all of the ordered lines in place and functioning. It turned out that by the time the work was done we needed almost double our best estimate of line expansion, and we found out too late that we couldn't get any more lines without waiting for BC Tel to lay more cable into our site. The cable is ordered, but won't be in for about 60 days. In the mean time we have retained some Port Moody lines but had them placed onto the same overline group as the ones in Burnaby. We have ample capacity between the two sites to serve these few lines, and don't expect anyone will even know which site they are actually connected to.
We actually have plenty of lines, but all our expansion has gone to the 28,800 number (257-1101). If you absolutely have to get onto the 'Net and find the 14,400 (257-1100) lines busy, use the other number. The difference is only $.20/hour or so, and the faster lines will work with your slower modems exactly the same.
We also took the chance offered by the change in lines to reconfigure our 14,400 modem lines all to run at 57600 bps from the terminal servers. This did two things, one good, and the other bad. The good thing is that with the higher rate between modem and port the modem gets more chance to use its compression facility to boost the throughput. The bad thing was that we didn't do the re-configuration properly on some modems and many people experienced problems with X/Zmodem. This was fixed after some head scratching and much discussion in the wimsey.general news group.
The 28,800bps modems are on ports running at 115,200bps for the same reason. This speed gives the modems a chance to achieve their often quoted 4 times compression capability when transfering compressible files. In order to achieve this type of throughput the user must run their system at the same speed. Some of the software and hardware combinations won't allow this, but many do - and we have had many comments that our system is much more responsive than others people have tried. Note that you probably won't get full throughput with files being transfered from other sites for a variety of reasons, but the transfers from Wimsey's systems should be as fast as your computers can accept them.
We are well on our way towards revamping our WWW site. The initial Commercial pages are exciting and bold. Along the way you will notice that we have picked up some sponsors. This trend towards advertising in sites such as ours is just getting properly started, and we expect it to become one of the major driving forces in the evolution of the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular.
In addition to the MS Windows and Apple Mac environments, we are now also supporting the IBM OS/2 Warp users. A new news group wimsey.os2 has been formed to give users a forum for their comments and help. Many thanks to John Boyce (boyce@wimsey.com) for his help in making Warp work in the Wimsey environment. I'd also like to thank the people at IBM for their support and help too. We have also started an FTP area for Warp users at ftp:/pub/os2-warp. Again, many thanks to John Boyce.
Our training people have been busy with sessions for beginning and intermediate Internet, and beginning, intermediate and advanced HTML (for WWW producers). More classes are being scheduled for January, and for those who want to learn more about using and creating CGI scripts we are putting together a course on using the UNIX shell and Perl in this area. One of the many complaints we get from neophyte HTML people is that they can't get CGI scripts to work in their home public_html areas. These classes will give you the programming knowledge needed to understand and create working and useful scripts. Watch for announcements on dates.
richard
admin@wimsey.com