The Netiquette Approach

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• "Netiquette" dates from the 1970s and 1980s
  • Two important factors: participants were technical people involved in highly technical discussion, and long messages were very expensive
• Technical discussion involves point-by-point criticism, response, and improvement
• Long messages were expensive.
  • Today, we measure disk space in terabytes (10^12 half-width characters) and a 1TB disk might have a price of 30,000 yen. Then, disk space was measured in megabytes and a 100MB disk might cost 100,000 yen. Today, we measure bandwidth in megabytes, and we pay a monthly charge of 2500 to 5000 yen to the phone, Internet, and cable company. Then, bandwidth was measured in kilobytes, and we paid a few yen for each second of connection to the phone company, plus a monthly charge of 2500 to 5000 yen to the Internet company.
  • To reduce storage and transmission costs, it was best to quote only the material needed to give context to your own words. In practice, since email programs automatically include a quote of the whole original message, you need to trim (delete) unneeded material.
• These two factors lead to the inline style of message.

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