Hi Charles,

 > It's 'push' technology to automate delivery of each
 > FIDO echo
 > message as an email at an email account address and
 > reverse the
 > process to introduce replies into the same FIDO echo.
 > A 'robot'.

    Oh .... I misunderstood. I thought it was a private newsgroup. That
sounds easier.

 > Many moderators used to include a prohibition against
 > any use
 > of their FIDO echo for 'elist' robots use because it
 > is
 > detrimental to the BBS community in the long run. No
 > need for
 > new people to connect to a BBS anymore leaving many
 > who have
 > invested time/money in the hobby of BBS'g sitting with
 > zero
 > users even when FIDO echos are active. Sysops become
 > drones
 > moving echomail and not much else.

    I dropped escan's BBS about 18 months ago because nobody calls bulletin
boards anymore. It's so much easier for the punters to use the web. I have
no vested interest in BBS personally. It was useful before the information
highway became inseparable from internet. Now it isn't, and you will be the
first to agree that there's no use flogging a dead horse.

 > Elisting is the sucking sound the Internet makes as
 > FIDO and
 > BBS'g are sucked into commercial ventures such as
 > Yahoo to
 > increase their reach beyond the WWW browsing newbies.

    I'm not much into emotion about technical things, Charles.

 > Lurkers who take in information and give nothing back  love
 > elistings. Less effort for them. ;-)

    Makes sense. But we've gone off topic. To get back on topic, I did run
up MSVC and test out the sizeof question that was asked either by Neil or
by Jasen. The program looked suspiciously like c++ and it was called
something.cpp, but it was still pure ANSI C code, so I can accept the
results of the tests. If you have follwed these ramblings ... the answer is
"yes".

Best Wishes,
Bill.

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