Program end speed was: XBOX 360 2717

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Sing it. Though the terminal emulator under GNOME does seem to make it quite easy to increase font size (control-shift-+) -- if, of course, one uses GNOME. I don't always, because overall it seems too much designed to appeal to the point-and-click crowd.

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Yeah. One of the reasons I've thought about switching from direct access (News.Individual.Net here too) is that lately it seems to have random intermittent delays.

Something that just occurred to me, though, is that if I were to set up trn to use a local news spool built with leafnode (and I'm guessing it would be the same with slrnpull), article numbers would be with regard to the local news spool, which .... Currently I'm able to read news from different machines (and keep track on both of which articles have been read) by just keeping two .newsrc files in synch. That wouldn't work if the article numbers were different.

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1979! I would have guessed something later. Interesting!

(I was introduced to USENET by the sysadmin at a PPOE, somewhere in the late 1980s. He had set up a newsfeed on the company's mainframe, pulling news once an hour from the local university's newsfeed via a dial-up connection. This was "sold" to management as being a way to get good technical information from people around the world. I don't remember exactly how he sold them on the idea of getting the rec.* groups as well as the comp.* groups, but I do remember getting the impression that USENET worked mostly because of the efforts of a lot of people just like him -- putting in their time on a mostly-volunteer basis, to make something they liked and believed in work. Times have changed .... but I guess that mindset still exists, among people who work on open-source software?)

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.