Where did the time go? Well, for one thing, unless this is your full time job, it is far too easy to find other things that need doing. This can be especially true about those pesky domestic chores that you can't seem to get off your 'Honey Do' list. Also, being threatened with payment has a way of promoting focus, particularly when keeping the lights on and food on the table is involved.

I keep toying with the idea of having some portion of the HECnet mailing list being implemented on HECnet. What I mean is that most machines can run SMTP over DECnet. At one point CU20B was forwarding a very large amount of Internet messages over CCnet. I know that because I helped maintain the code. Of course, I have not finished putting my changes back into MMAILR and friends, so I can't volunteer to do this. Sigh...

I know DEC could have done something similar for the internal corporate DECnetwork, but this wasn't in place when I was at Marlboro. You had to go to a specific machine which had Internet access and send the email from there. At one point, it was 2102, but that got moved to a 2020 in the Federal Systems group, which was a real hike from the Galaxy group. I believe the general feeling at the time was that there was too much risk of DEC industry secrets being electronically exfiltrated.

On 1/24/22 1:40 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:

I second this! The transition appeared smooth to me, and I'm sure that did not happen without hard work behind the scenes. I had meant to join Update at the beginning of 2022 to help support the resources behind HECnet, and then I got distracted. Over three weeks have passed... where did the time go? Well, I'll take care of that now.

On Jan 23, 2022, at 5:06 PM, Ian McLaughlin <ian@platinum.net> wrote:

Thanks to the work of Johnny and others, I’d like to say how impressed I am with the smoothness of the transition of the mailing list and HECnet bridge services. No bumps, no duplicates, and no loss of data.

Great work Team!