45664,28,05/19/92,ARCADY KHOTIN,ALL
HELLO FROM RUSSIA,
Hi!
I'm calling via PCP from St.Petersburg, Russia! My name is Arcady Khotin.
I read a lot about this great board and now am very exited to be able
to use it. Is it true that Ward Christensen is still running it?
The telecommunications era just started in my country about a year and
Door
and now have access to Internet and even Sprint. Telephone lines are noisy,
telefaxes are still a novelty and the to access international line one
has to book a call , and it often takes three days to make it. The solution -
telecommunications via modems. Networks are growing like mashrooms. And
new disappointment - as it turned out, in your country not all businesses are
using E-Mail at all. So, to reach you we still have to rely on phone and fax.
 I need your advice, colleagues - what should we do to find out if this and
that company has access to E-Mail without calling or faxing them? Do you
have some directories of E-Mail addresses accessible from Internet or some
commercial nets like CompuServe? Or books or catalogues?
As an example I'll tell you true story happened a few days ago: we had
problems with streamer made by Irwine Magnetics. They have 800 number and I
asked one of my US friends to give them a call and ask about my problem.
He did called, but couldn't solve it. So I asked him to ask them about if
they have E-Mail - and it turned out that they haven't! So here am I with
my unsolved problem and without access to the guys to ask. And there are
lots of similar cases.
To make it short - please advice, what should I do to find E-Mail address of
a company, if I can't call'em up and ask.
Best regards to clleagues!
Hope to hear your answers.
Arcady
45665,15,05/19/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,ARCADY KHOTIN
R/HELLO FROM RUSSIA,
  Yep, still running the board - ancient though it is.
  You use the term "E-mail" as if we had some great infrastructure here in
the "states" that connected lots of people - but actually I know of no such
thing.	I have some friends at a small company, and I can get to them
via Compuserve, using >MHS:name@node  which is the Novell (?not even sure?)
Mail Handler Service.  Other companies, are on Compuserve directly (Borland,
Microsoft, Norton, Fox, etc).  Some companies - such as GREAT technical
support for tape drives from Colorado, are supported by individuals with no
forum on Compuserve.  BUT I'm not sure how you get to/from the internet and
Compuserve - I think there are IDs, but as a sponsored Compuserve Sysop it
turns I'm not ALLOWED to access the Internet (perhaps there is an extra
fee, I don't know).
    So, I'm not sure how you'd access various companies.  It might help if you
contact them individually - admittedly slowly - by mail, and establish what
the best means is to contact them electronically.
45764,25,10/01/92,CLIFF SHARP,MURRAY ARNOW
BOOKS,
   After being too busy for too long to look up the references you gave
during our monitor/CRT/electron-microscope/etc. discussion of last year,
I finally went out and had the library run some of the references.  The
books were INCREDIBLY hard to find; took two months to get them.
   "Color Television Picture Tubes" was a tome, but very, VERY informative.
Much of what I read there was absolute news to me; construction details,
research over the "ages", ideas, ideas, ideas.	Never made it through the
whole book.  I'll have to try to get my own copy of it.
   The "Handbook of Vacuum devices..." book was also incredibly fascinating.
Looking at what was in there, I found that glass discolors not only because
of the continual X-ray bombardment, but also just because of electron
bombardment!  Noted also that electron bombardment causes outgassing; very
interesting, and certainly explains the presence of the getter.  Heck,
just the first few pages were informative; I always thought "Pyrex" glass
was impervious to sudden heat changes (as I was instructed in high school),
and found in, no less, a FOOTNOTE that the term Pyrex is used to refer to
over 150 types of glass composition.
   All in all, I can't say enough in one long, boring message about the
books to which you referred us last year.  I just hope I can find my own
copies of them and put them to some study.  Unfortunately, these are my
last few days with them; because of State cuts in Library funds, anything
that doesn't exist in an SLS library could cost $10 as a retrieval fee,
just to get the two-week loan.
   In case you didn't notice, I've kept all the messages we exchanged back
then and am using them as instructional materials...
45765,16,10/01/92,CLIFF SHARP,ALL
DISK FORMAT SOFTWARE,
   Because of some repairs I had to make at the local public library on
their PS/2-30 systems (intentional and very skillful damage to software),
I'm currently looking for code, preferably assembly code, to deal with the
floppy disk controllers of today and use them to create weird, undecipherable
formats for disks which the librarians would loan for use of the computers.
Does anyone know of any sources for such information?  Some sample code in
assembler would be preferred, but any and all help would be appreciated.
  The most notable thing about the damage was that it was done by a "young
person" (read: 15-year-old), and it was done with great skill.	They
somehow not only removed the system files from the disk, they managed to
put the \DOS directory in cluster 2 (where, of course, IO.SYS or IBMBIO.COM
usually reside), and do other things that I thought were beyond the skills
of the average hacker.	I'm trying to goof-proof their systems for them,
gratis, of course.
   Book recommendations would be nice, but in my present unemployed state
I might not be able to access those books.
45864,05,11/03/92,TONY ANTONUCCI,WARD & ROY
COMMAND.COM,
Cont. from last msg. I lost my train of thought. in the last msg.
In my CHKCMD program I had to build in the CRC from as many different
COMMAND.COMs as I could find. Never found any two that generated the
same CRC, even ones that were the same size. If nothing else the
output of the VER command, would make every OEM version different.
45865,03,11/03/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,TONY ANTONUCCI
R/FAX,
  I finally ordered PM-FAX and I'll see how it looks.  Doggone WinFaxPro
just didn't work under OS/2.
  Then the fax modem broke, rats....
45964,02,12/15/92,AL HIGGINS,WARD CHRISTENSEN
R/CBBS 15TH *PARTY*,
I love the graphics, reminds me of the days of AMSI and N*
- Reguards - !!
45965,02,12/16/92,ROY LIPSCOMB,WARD
R/CBBS 15TH *PARTY*,
I still have a collection of vintage newsletters from CACHE (I think).
I check through them and see what phone numbers haven't changed.
me rep