INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS
Four Groups of Standards
Which Will Help Computer Conferencing
by Bob Sprigge


To communicate around the world successfully we need international standards. To contact a conferencing computer in another country you can either make an international phone call or, less expensively, use a Packet Data Network (PDN). Most countries now have at least one PDN connected to the international network. If you have an account (NUI) with one and the computer you wish to contact has an address on one (NUA) then after accessing your local PDN you can be connected to the computer in a couple of seconds.

The data is error-corrected while on the PDN by formatting it into packets. Such services are frequently referred to by the name of the International Standard X.25. Most users access their PDN by dialing in on the ordinary phone lines. Noise is inevitable, but it seems ironic that many calls are error corrected for 99% of their journey, i.e. that part on the PDN, but ruined by the connection between home/office and the PDN. British Telecom has recently started using an error correcting protocol (E-PAD) for this part, but it would seem better to use X.25 for this as well. If most modems included a PAD (Packet Assembler/Disassembler) the price should come down.

North America is finally joining the world with modem standards--the 2400 bits per second standard is designated as "V.22 bis". The Bell standard for 300 bits per second was not only not used by most countries but the phone company or post office could disconnect the user entirely if found using non-approved equipment.

Most conferencing is done in a restricted character set known as ASCII, but for many applications Graphics is essential. Color graphics communication currently has lots of standards, each incompatible with the others. Britain has been using a 40-character wide 8-color system for many years both on television and computer services. The quality of graphics is very poor unless a skilled or very patient operator is doing the designing. It was devised for one way transmission. It is called CEPT level 1 or more usually Prestel or CEEFAX graphics. Germany and Luxembourg are using CEPT level 3, which is to a much higher standard and Prestel is now working on CEPT level 5, which is picture quality. It will be difficult to use until the 64k bits per second channels in ISDN become commonplace. Canada has the Telidon graphics standard and Japan has Captain. Computer conferencing requires certain shapes, such as lines, boxes and circles, to be created easily by most users. The system known as NAPLPS may be the most suitable for this usage. Unfortunately it appears that very little editing software exists for NAPLPS compared to the Prestel editing software, which is available for a large range of computers. Prestel-compatible inkjet printers are also available.

ISDN is the international standard for a digital phone and data network which will replace the current phone service, but retain the pair of wires between home/office and Exchange (known as Central or Central Office in most countries).

Electronic Mail systems are now being linked together thanks to the use of the X.400 standards. These are now being extended to cover conferencing systems. Document standards are being formulated so that a word-processed document can be sent to a mail or conferencing system and be received complete with underlining, etc. in a way that can be modified with all the attributes retained.

With these standards, conferencing will be even more interesting, useful and *fun* in the future.

An interesting example of lack of standards was given to me yesterday. The People Link computer refused to act on a set of users instructions saying "This is NOT CompuServe", when the user had accidentally put in CompuServe commands, forgetting where he was for a moment.

But what of language? As well as Japanese, French, German, and many others, we also have the difference between English as used in Europe and American English. After reading American computer magazines with their strange expressions I am pleasantly surprised that this problem very rarely causes problems in conferencing. I did note that Lisa used the verb "to bomb" in the last Netweaver. The meaning in England is the opposite to that in America.

"To table" is another example. Should the international phone companies persuade us all to use Esperanto?

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Author's Note: Bob Sprigge has been networking from England for
some time and is part of NETREACH there. He is currently logging
on from Luxembourg where he is an Informaticien for the European
Economic Commission.