Quote:
Originally Posted by B.T.
You're both right, here. And that's where the problems start for me. One of my players (The youngest, in his early 20ies.) is a university student of computer science. I should better be prepared, if he asks questions on that subject. But my computer knowledge is very limited. Therefore it's good to have the opinions of others. I cannot be the know-all-guy with knowledge on each and every subject. But to entertain my group, I should better have an idea about the real life situation! If I know basic facts, I can simplify for my game, without getting all the facts wrong.
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This is what I'd tell him:
USENET is available, but is mostly gobbledygook. Anyone dumb enough to send messages in the clear containing important information will get what they deserve...and there's no real guarantee that the messages will be propagated on the backbone anyway.
EMAIL is the most reliable electronic communication, as long as PGP encryption is used. But it may still take hours to days for a message to propagate across the now fractured internet.
WWW is completely out. It wasn't huge in 1995/'96 - there were probably only on the order of a few million websites. Given the state of telecom backbones even the simplest HTTP page is going to be a huge drain on bandwidth.
TELNET, assuming you can find a remote system to telnet into, is the other reliable feature.
IRC - available, but not at all reliable. IRC was/is a mess now with the internet being as strong as it is, it was worse in our own 1997, postnuke it would be practically unusable. But you never know...
FTP - available but extremely slow. Like, agonizingly slow. Like, here's a 128kb program I need...It'll be downloaded tomorrow slow. This assumes the remote site stays up all that time. A LOT of servers will probably have posted as MOTDs that they only have x uptime during a given day.
Nothing fancy works any more, it's all command line driven.