Re: Real-time or Turn-based?

[Dan Lyke]

On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Morbus Iff wrote:
> The near future? I don't want to get on a horrible discussion about Bell
> Atlantic and their hidden agenda, but working at an ISP in New Hampshire, I
> know that no time in the near future will we be totally rid of POTS lines.
> We've been trying to get a PRI from them for about 3 months...

Sometimes these Bay Area colored glasses distort things...

However, my friends at the ISP I helped start in Chattanooga are resorting
to all sorts of microwave, laser, and other things to get faster bandwidth
and fixed IP addresses. And with TCI buying product, Scientific Atlanta
will have a reason to make the cable IP boxes cheap. It's coming, and the
most the phone companies can do is slow it down.

> >said that long-distance network play failed for them. Not for any
> >technical reasons, but because it was much easier for the
> >socialization that created the rivalries and the sense of community to
> >happen when everyone was frequently in the same room together.
> 
> Would there be a way to work around that? Sure, they said it didn't work,
> but damn, wouldn't it be great if WE could get it to work?

Well, what you've got to get working is the general socialization. Ultima
may be getting some of that, but I think that it's likely to get the same
base portion of the population that will MUD, or IRC, and peak out.

I know given the option between hanging out with my friends in real-life,
or going home and typing to them, I'm often more into the real-life
scenario. And I'm pretty darned mailing-list active.

Before I started the aforementioned ISP we had a 12 line information
service that wasn't used outside of business hours, so we set up a chat
system on it. A whole bunch of people we knew dropped by occasionally,
usually for e-mail, but the same 5-7 people hung on the thing every spare
moment. Similarly, when we started the ISP, we never really expanded our
customer base in the heavy users, certainly not in proportion to how we
expanded with the regular users.

Dan