Re: New proposal from Ronald J. Fitzherbert

[Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>]

On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> Now that you have introduced a neutral third party, why go through all
> this effort to parse email and introduce worries about delivery
> latency and such just to avoid having the neutral third party run a
> simple database lock, when having the party run a database locking
> mechanism is probably much easier? I mean, this is a decades old
> technology that is well understood.

And I have access to an MAI Basic 4 minicomputer manufactured in the late 
1970's with a 5+5 disk drive that could be used to implement this database
by connecting all the terminal ports on the MAI machine to a terminal
server to give telnet access to the database. Another machine (Pentium)
could be used to set up a round-robin telnet proxy and to put a CGI and/or
email frontend on the MAI machine. The only problem I can see is with the
disk size but I believe that there are 20 mega and 40 meg drives available
for this machine so that should be sufficient for just the locking
protocol. 

Michael Dillon                   -               ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael@memra.com