[aprssig] Packet Node on 144.390 ?

[Ray McKnight]

WinLink itself has nothing to do with "only runs under Windows".
You can talk to a TNC or SCS Pactor modem using only a dumb
terminal, and communications program that can pass ASCII commands
out the serial port.  So these are commonly available in all operating
systems.  Unfortunately few bother to learn how to use their TNC's in
terminal mode.  During the early days, this is all we had, there were no
fancy front end programs.  When Procomm was released, that was the cat's
meow but is was still only a manual command line interface from the users
standpoint talking to the TNC.

Yes, Airmail is a native Winderz app, but as has been pointed out if you
can get Wine to work you can run Airmail under emulation in Linux.
Airmail is absolutely NOT a necessary interface to WinLink.  It's simply
another widget intended to present non-technical people a familiar interface
to make them more comfortable using the system, and reduce training and
set-up time, especially in places like an EOC where you might have dozens
of non-Hams from many different backgrounds needing to send e-mail.  By
giving them a familiar Outlook-style interface it makes the stress level go
down.

If you can use a terminal program and issue command line ASCII commands
you can use Winlink on anything with a serial port, even a CP/M box or
Commodore-64, on both VHF or HF.

That's what I call backward compatibility.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Noel Shrum" <ar798 at tcnet.org>
To: "TAPR APRS Mailing List" <aprssig at lists.tapr.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 10:14
Subject: Re: [aprssig] Packet Node on 144.390 ?


> KA8VIT wrote:
> > Winlink ???   arrrggghhhh  !
> >
> > Bill  KA8VIT
>
> I personaly don't like the idea that it only works in windows and
> ignores OSX and linux/unix/bsd/whatever.
>
> Noel W8TVI
>
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