Applying cost to ZMH means that it has always been broken and can
never be fixed. No matter what one does with ZMH, anyone wishing to
send crash mail to another zone or in their own zone via long distance
will have to deal with cost. Even if all Zones observe ZMH during the
same time each day, someone, somewhere will have to call at peak cost
hour(s) to crash a Netmail. IONs that are charged for calls to their
ISP still have the same problem. Basing ZMH solely on cost means that
ZMH was worthless from the start and should never have been made part
of policy.

With that said and all the nonsense arguments from people that simply
can't/won't understand and/or were not there at the time.....

ZMH was designed to be a time when any Node in Fidonet could call
another Node and not have to worry if the other Node would be busy
with a user online playing games, the system processing echomail or no
mailer online at all because the Sysop only operated a mailer during
ZMH.

Remember that in the day, 2400 baud was fast and 20 meg drives were
huge. CPUs were slow and echomail was large. It would not be unusual
for a system to be tossing echomail for several minutes after each
run. Since Dos didn't multi-task very well, the system would be
offline while echomail was being tossed in and out. Then the echomail
bundles had to be sent. At 1200-2400 baud, this also took time. If a
system were to have echomail coming in and out during ZMH, then it
wouldn't be unusual for several minutes of ZMH to be spent by the
system just for handling echomail. Between the echomail runs, a user
would log on and spend 10 to 30 minutes (or more) online. In those
days, Nodes actually had BBSs online and real live humans actually
called via modem to read/reply to mail, play games and/or get the
latest software that was available. Many/most systems had one phone
line. If it was tied up handling echomail or users, then ZMH was lost
to anyone that was trying to send a crash Netmail.

Instead of having "Zone Mail Hour", one would have "Zone mail half
hour... or less." :)

You think I'm kidding?? Figure out how to slow your Pentium 4 500
giga-hertz cpu down to a 286 12 megahertz and reduce your memory to 1
meg. Then try processing a 1 or 2 meg echomail bundle. Oh yeah, and
install a 20 meg MFM hard drive to boot! Run the system under Dos 5.00
as well. ;)

The "cost savings" factor amounted to not having to make several
attempts to connect and failing because of users online or echomail
being handled. At the time, many phone companies charged from the time
the modem took the phone off the hook.... IOW, from the time the ATD
command was sent to the modem and the modem reacted by opening the
line.

I'd almost bet that 75% of the Nodes in Fidonet can't remember or
never had the "pleasure" of watching a mail bundle being process so
slowly that one could (almost) make out the name or Node number of
where the mail was being tossed to/from. :)  When I first started in
Fidonet, I ran a 386 SX16 with 4 megs of memory and a 40 meg hard
drive. It was fast compared to some and I could still watch the
progress bar on Frontdoor move across the screen rather slowly during
a mail run. ;)

Anyway, *THAT IS* what ZMH *WAS* for. What it is for now is a
political toy to be argued over by people. :(

Regards,
Frank

http://pages.sbcglobal.net/flv
http://biseonline.com/r19

... Before you teach tricks to a dog, make sure you know more than the dog.

--- PPoint 3.01