Re: Interest in Golden Orchard II?

[jagaroth@leland.Stanford.EDU (Jim Maricondo)]

In article <4atupo$eli@nntp3.news.primenet.com>,
John Bowling <johnlb@Primenet.Com> wrote:
>Why AOL?  I left their system years ago when they quit supporting Apple IIs.
>Wouldn't archives from other online services be just as good?

The reasons are several fold:

1) Like it or not, AOL does/did have a lot of files that nobody else
has. (and the reverse is true for GEnie, etc..)

2) The AOL AII libraries will likely disappear soon, and I heard they were
being "pruned" (i.e. deleting "less popular" files) awhile back, and with
them will disappear all the files that were exclusive to AOL, and all the
collections AOL built up.  So an archive of AOL seems to be more of a
prioirty than other places where AII files are safe.

3) It's much quicker to transfer files from AOL than from GEnie.

>Like Apple used us to pay their development of the Mac and then dumped 
>us, AOL used our money to pay for far better service for Mac and IBM, and 
>haven't updated the Apple software for OVER 8 years!

>I hate this kind of discrimination no matter what company it comes from, 
>and I also don't want to support them in ANY way, including the payment 
>someone is making for the time to download the files for a CD.

Yes, I know how poorly AOL treated it's AII users.  But the forum staff
was top notch (and I'm not just saying that because I was on it for a
short period of time :), and like it or not, AOL's management had nothing
to do with the quality and content of the AOl Apple II software libraries
which were kept so well by the dedicated Apple II forum staff.  If you
want to ignore all their hard work in maintaining great libraries because
your peeved at the lame AOL management, then that's your choice. (not to
sound snobby..)

>Sorry, I wouldn't buy a CD of things from AOL unless the AOL section was 
>a minor portion.

It is still undecided what will happen..  I have a feeling that I could
fill up a whole CD with just AOL stuff, if I included compressed and
decompressed versions of everything.  But then there wouldn't be room for
updated versions of files on Golden Orchard, not to mention people's
contributions, so then there is a chance that there might be 2 upcoming
CDs from DigiSoft... :)  It's all very up in the air right now.

 -Jim
-- 
Jim Maricondo | jagaroth@leland.stanford.edu
Stanford  '98 | http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~jagaroth/