Dear Jack;

In the February Issue of "BOARDWATCH MAGAZINE" you had some good articles on
INTERNET. But there was a major error in the article called "FINDING THE
ON-RAMP TO THE INTERNET. The article mentions CompuServe, American Online,
GEnie and the possibility of Prodigy, but did not mention Delphi.

Delphi has complete access to INTERNET, including e-mail, FTP, Telnet,
Gopher, Archie, WWW, Wais and others. Delphi has three payment plans: pay as
you go; 10/10 plan, ten hours per month for ten dollars; and the 20/20 plan,
twenty hours a month for twenty dollars. The 10/10 plan and the 20/20 plan
costs cover everything on Delphi, no extra charges. A Delphi member can get
on INTERNET for an extra three dollars a month.

I would think that Delphi would be a good alternet to the other commercial
services. The other services only have e-mail while Delphi gives complete
INTERNET service.

I hope this will be of service to the other readers of your fine magazine.
Keep up the good work

 Craig Colombel
 Seattle, Washington
 internet address
 Colombel@Delphi.com


I'm afraid your points are all well taken. I think the point of the article
was to illustrate how to use large commercial services for Internet mail that
many of our readers might not normally think of as HAVING an Internet
connection - precisely because they DON'T offer ftp, telnet, etc. It was not
meant as an exhaustive article covering everything that DOES offer Internet
connectivity. Many CompuServe, GEnie, and AOL customers aren't aware that
they can at least send and receive electronic mail globally.

BIX, DELPHI, THE WELL, etc. all offer much higher levels of Internet
connectivity, have more technically adroit users, and I think it would be
perhaps misplaced to offer some candy basic article on "how to send e-mail"
for those users. It has nothing to do with DELPHI not being "major". My
understanding is that numbers-wise, they would rank fourth just slightly
behind AOL and are doing quite well with a very aggressive pricing plan.

That said, I found Don Rittner's article a bit shallow all the way across for
my own tastes. We do periodically receive criticism that we're not doing
enough for the novices in Boardwatch. The standard party line here is that
Boardwatch readers aren't novices very long. But I had been hearing a bit
about this lately and so I thought we would put something like this in.
Probably a bad move. In any event, I agree that DELPHI is offering one of the
connectivity bargains of the year for Internet access, we've written
something a bit more descriptive in this issue regarding the DELPHI program,
and your wrath is probably righteous.

How's that for "lots of sucking up."

 Jack Rickard