It was ... peer-to-peer things that made the Internet popular.
Yes. Before there was the web (back in the days of HOSTS.TXT and
ftp clients on so few platforms that one's best efforts to convert
carriage returns were often foiled), email-based file servers were
popular, and they still are. Asyncronous messaging of files is why
Internet messages, which support sevral methods of in-line file
transfer, are dominant and will continue to be.
Based upon some data on "web ready cell phones" being used primarily
to send text messages ....
The advantage of such messaging is not that it is text, but that it
is asyncronous.
Anyone who is interested in obtaining asyncronous audio file messaging
on cellular telephones might ask Laurence Lundblade at Qualcomm --
mailto:lgl(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com -- about which models of the QCP phone line
will be capable of supporting it, etc. The last I heard there was
some question as to whether the manufactuer would include a routine
for data transfer from the voice memo buffer to the seperate CPU
address space used for the PalmOS Eudora program.
Qualcomm's highest-level management have advocated this for years, it
turns out (and I have it on good authority that is why there is a
vocodec built in to Eudora); I wonder if they realize that those goals
are again being thwarted by some overseas programmer goofing off
instead of writing code for an already-existing API.
Cheers,
James