Remarks on the Home Terminal Club Proposal

	Overall, I am enthusiastic about the  idea,  but  not  overly
optimistic about the chances of success.

	I  find the dial-up communication costs to be prohibitive for
some of the things I want to do now.  If I read the rates  right,  it
costs about a dollar an hour to call Stanford from Cupertino, and six
dollars an hour from Berkeley.  An attempt to  reduce  this  cost  by
leasing  lines,  would  be  expensive  in  itself,  and might lead to
substantial complexity like "TYMNET".     Even  the  incomming  phone
equipment is quite complex.  There will be various kinds of terminals
dialing up at various data rates, plus leased lines comming in.


		Point by Point Response

1(machine choice) There is a severe upward compatibility problem.  If
we do this on a very small scale, we might start with Bruce's  system
on the 11/05, and progress to an 11/45.  If we want PDP-10's there is
no similar price performance spread, unless we start with a PDP-6  or
build our own.

2a(file  storage)  The  file  storage  may  give  rise  to a security
problem.   There are certain "diary-like" things I hesitate to put on
the  machine,  and  some  people  may  feel  the same about financial
things.     There is certainly a considerable  cost  associated  with
backup.

b(light  computation)  The  amount  of  computation may be a problem.
Tymshare started with a fixed connect time charge and progressed to a
more detailed form of billing.

c(games)  I  believe  that  quite  a few of the games require lots of
compute power or real time interaction.   No  doubt  there  are  some
suitable ones, but I wonder if this will be a big thing.

d(news)  This  is  a great idea if we can get the news services to go
along.

e(dial-out) Tymshare has not solved the problem  of  controlling  and
billing  this service.   Dial out facilities exist on their machines,
but are not available to users.

f(messages) This may have legal problems.  I believe that Tymshare is
currently  obliged  to  "add  value"  to  data sent over its net, and
cannot rent it for purely communication purposes.

g(reservations) This sounds like a good hack, but I doubt we can find
anyone who feels secure in letting us do it.

h(computer aided instruction) See appendix.

i(reading)

j(written discussion) See messages.


k(bullitin board and ads) It would be wonderful if we could partially
support ourselves by selling advertising.    This is intreagueing.

				...

z(else)

3(employees)

4(communication) See opening remarks.

5(terminals)

6(club's computer) Leaving the  machine  unattended  demands  a  high
standard  of  reliability  which  might exclude such hacks as using a
PDP-6 or building our own.  Actually, it might be  worse  than  that.
Moving machinery like a disk drive could do itself a lot of damage if
no-one were around to turn it off when it failed.

7(programming) This sounds ok, but we will have the usual reliability
and  maintenance  problems with software.  Quality standards would be
hard to impose on volunteers.

8(first steps) I am willing to help, but cannot currently promise  to
join.

			Remarks

	There  are  various  data  bases I would like to have machine
access to which we might explore.  These include:  a good dictionary,
Books  in  print,  various membership lists eg. AMS, library catalogs
(we could approach  Spires-Ballots),  phone  books(I  doubt  this  is
possible, unless we get good OCR equipment.

			Terminals

	I  think  that  terminals  can  be  divided into sevral rough
classes in a useful way.

	At the bottom are the printing terminals.  The Tymshare 30cps
silent,  printing  terminals  are  minimally acceptable.  Faster hard
copy devices may come along.  I find these more useful than  a  crude
screen without available hard copy.

	The  interesting class of things to explore are the terminals
of roughly Imlac capability.    A  little  slow  down  to  accomodate
dial-up  might  be  ok.   Storage should be sufficient to hold a full
screen. I think that continuous scrolling  would  be  easier  on  the
eyes.    Most  important, the resident program could be changed under
control of the main program.   There  is  no  reason  for  it  to  be
constant.

	In  the  direction  of  the  Xerox  herasy,  there  are  home
facilities. I think this is a wonderful idea  with  limitations.    I
don't  think  that any public storage can be kept in facilities which
are not bonded in some way.  Among other problems, I believe that the
copyright  situation  with  books  is the correct one.  Once you have
published, you cannot withdraw.  This would not be  enforceable  with
home storage, and would lead to a lot of copying.

	I  don't  think   the   home   facility   should   have   any
responsibilities to a net, but I think it is an inevitable end result
of terminal developement.

			Suggestion

	I think we  would  do  well  to  consult  both  Tymshare  and
Resourse  1  about  some of these things.  We might also watch to see
how the various home computer outfits: Baumgart, McGuire, Petit  etc.
fare.

			Appendix

	I  am  interested in the "self documenting system".   I think
that the question mark feature can be developed into  a  very  useful
thing  if  it  is  made  smart  enough.  The first step is to allow a
question mark in any position in a command and find all parses  which
are admissible.  For example:

? foo←bar/n/q

must be a copy not a rename because of the switches.  The next step I
see is the recognition of synonyms.  This, incidentally, is a fault I
find  with  Pub  generated indexes.  They include the right word, but
not similar wrong ones.