RJT> What annoys me more than anything else is the limitations
 RJT> built into some software that isn't exactly related to size,
 RJT> but to line count!

 ml> and its even more annoying if one stops and really 
 ml> looks that the specs for fidonet messages... namely the 
 ml> line that says that message bodies are unbounded ie: 
 ml> unlimited in size... the limits and such that are in 
 ml> place came from "lazy coders" who didn't want to take 
 ml> the time to figure out how to work around handling 
 ml> stuff larger than their available buffer(s)... reminds 
 ml> me of that old bill gates saying about 640K of memory...

Mark:

How long have you been around fidonet?

Yes, the specs don't specify a limit.  There was common agreement that
*unlimited* was not realistic back when the original specs were designed. 
Running fidonet on two 360Kb floppy disks with 176Kb of memory in the
system didn't leave a lot of room.....  Ok, so I was later able to add 10
Mb, 20Mb and later 40Mb hard disk drive to the system and later 756Kb of
memory....    Modern systems could handle significantly larger messages
than what we could back then -- if software kept up.  No, maximus did not
run on that original, limited hardware.....   But the original fido /
fidonet did run on that original hardware.  From memory, squish can
currently (when properly configured) handle up to 256Kb or 512Kb message
size.  Based on ~5Kb per regular type written page, that's over 50 type
written pages for a fidonet mesage, and these are messages, not file
attachments, html, etc.  Fidonet messages are (mostly) just ASCII text.... 
I don't see the need to write a short novel for a fidonet message -- net
mail or echo mail....  Not what this media was intended for....

Even standard (unix) send mail had message size limits, typically set to
5Mb for the maximus e-mail message size....  So, I don't buy the need for
unlimited message size.  There are other protocols for sending files
around.  This protocol was designed for readable text based messages.

Take care.....

Bob Jones, 1:343/41

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