email to/from Russia

[L. Douglas Taylor]

>The following information/opinion was offered to me by Michele L. Pedro,
>director of operations at Russian Technology Language Services, Inc. of
>Tallahassee FL (75212.345 at CompuServe.com), a company in which I have a
>financial interest. The note came in response to my having forwarded the
>message from Jennifer Greene-Krupala (jgkrupala at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU) regarding
>Smartlink Corp and a new product called CP_TUNER 1.0.....
>
>"Both sender and receiver of an emailed text should use the same program.
>UUENCODE and UUDECODE are free and, as I see it, used by most people.
>[This] also works for Russian. Therefore, I see no need [for anyone] to
>purchase another program. MLP"

While at first this seems a feasible solution to write messages to one
another in Russian (or any language based in Cyrillic), there are some
serious flaws in the underlying assumptions made.  First, while UUencode
and UUdecode are both available for free, their availability is
questionable - how would your "average" Russian know to acquire them?  Too,
there's the questionable need of adding more steps to a process than
necessary; I would hazard the opinion that most Slavists and "language
professionals" aren't exactly hard-core computer enthusiasts, unlike Ms.
Pedro and/or me ...

But the most prominent problem is the plethora of "standards" available;
the parties would have to agreed ahead of time which fonts they would use
in the encoding - and there are 5 (yes, five) standards to choose from:
KOI8r, KOI-8 ukrainian, CP-866 (Codepage 866, Alternative PC choice),
CP-1251 (MS-Windows), and Apple Cyrillic (Macintosh, of course).  Encoding
two different standards would be next to useless ...

It's for these reasons that there does exist, to some degree, a market for
programs/packages that eliminate the need to have multiple steps for
writing, encoding, sending, decoding, guessing, praying, etc.  And as such,
a program that would "tune" this process, eliminating a lot of the mess,
would be a good idea.

Of course, Eudora versions 1.5.1 and up already do this.  A good reference
on "Russifying" a machine to read and write Cyrillic via Internet
applications (e.g., Eudora) using a Macintosh is the following page:

http://www.pitt.edu/~mapst57/rus/russian.html



--
 We cross our bridges when we come to them,  | Lance Douglas Taylor
 And burn them behind us, leaving us with    | taylor+ at osu.edu
 nothing but the memory of the smell of      |
 smoke, and the presumption that once our    | Just another meerkat in the
 eyes watered ... - Rosencrantz              | electronic jungle ...