Seeking reverse-engineers - Apple II VisiCalc

[Jules Richardson]

der Mouse wrote:
>> Lots of us already back up across a LAN to a machine (regardless of
>> the storage technology behind the scenes), so it's not a big leap to
>> do that to some off-site server; it's just that the upstream data
>> rates from the home aren't really *quite* there yet.
> 
> I doubt that, actually; I back up live to a big backup disk at home,
> and I have that disk backed up live over my DSL line.  And mine is
> about as slow as consumer DSL gets; we switched me from RADSL to MVL
> because it performs better on almost-too-long copper, and even that
> tops out at about 0.4Mbps (RADSL was dropping out entirely at times and
> not syncing above about 512kbps at all).

Are you just sending modified data each time? I suspect that isn't actually 
too bad - my "too slow" comment was more a reflection on how awful sending the 
initial xGB of data would be, and that'd put a lot of people off. (hmm, 
service where you could mail in a hard disk with the initial data set on, 
maybe? :-)

> I
> suspect that what's actually lacking is the software for it in a form
> easy enough to drop in that the masses can use it.

It'd be kind of fun to cook something up. The majority of home users probably 
just have multiple GB of music and images which don't ever really change 
anyway (and any protocol could even include stuff like "this file was moved" 
just to speed that particular case up a bit).

But yeah, "drop in" is a bit difficult, at least if you want to support 
Windows/OSX/Linux/*BSD...

cheers

J.