Dear Readers,

   I have moved the Mail and FTP functions of the Mechanical Music
Digest from an aging Sun 3/60 to a Pentium machine running BSDI 3.0.
Over the last few months I've been working on getting the Pentium
system ready for today's switchover.  I'm nervous that there will be
some things that aren't just right, but I think I've managed to get
most of it right.  Please let me know if you observe anything strange.

   Some of you have had problems with getting your Digests.  The problems
have been more pronounced recently.  I think that switching over
to an operating system  that is 8 years more modern is going to help.
In particular, users in the domains "att.net" and ".us" should see an
immediate improvement.

   The reason for the e-mail delivery improvement is that the old Sun's
e-mail system erroneously appends ".com" onto the end of the address,
and only delivers it to the correct place if that address doesn't exist.
As more and more sub-domains have been added in the .com domain, the
chances of having an address which doesn't end in .com get routed to
the wrong place has increased.  This new system should fix that.  It also
doesn't hurt that the machine is 40 times faster (120 MIPS vs 3 MIPS),
has 4 times more RAM (64 Meg vs 16 Meg), and 3 times more hard disk
(11 gigabytes vs 3 gigabytes).

 - - -

   BSDI is a commercial derivative of the work done at UC Berkeley
to make a Unix "clone" unencumbered by binary and source license
restrictions imposed by Unix System Labs (formerly AT&T).

   The IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers) thought
enough of Unix to develop a standard so that applications written for
one Unix-ish operating system implementation would be compatible with
other Unix-ish operating system implementations.  That standard is
called Posix, and for legal reasons, all the "Unix clones" (BSDI,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux, and probably others) don't refer to themselves
as Unix Clones at all, but claim "Posix Compliance".

   The implications of Posix Compliance are profound.  Complicated
programs can generally be recompiled and run with little or no alterations
to their source code.  In many cases the configuration files required to
make system application programs work are very similar, because the
source code is usually from a common origin.  Vendors who achieve
Posix compliance of their operating system without copying USL's
source code may distribute the source on their own terms.  Thus
source code is available for BSD derivatives and Linux.  As a computer
scientist this is WONDERFUL.  As a system administrator, its valuable
because there is a large community of experts on the Internet who
can answer quesions. There are e-mail forums similar to this one
dedicated to discussing every obscure feature and bug of Unix-ish
systems and their application programs.

 - - -

   My thanks to everyone for their patience during the switchover.  We
don't think any messages have been lost, but you never know.  If you
haven't seen a message you submitted, or aren't getting your Digests
reliably, please let us know.

Jody