Fun_People Archive
20 Feb
ADVERTISEMENT: America Offline

Date: Tue, 20 Feb 96 12:56:43 -0800
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: ADVERTISEMENT: America Offline

Forwarded-by: bostic@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: "Gregory S. Halbrook" <gsh@iti.org>
From: Steve Bass <71333.130@compuserve.com>

Free Software Helps You Get Offline in 5 Easy Steps!

Every day you hear more and more people talking about it. You hear about it
at work, in restaurants, even on the bus. More and more Americans are
discovering how much more time they have, how much easier it is to manage
their money, and personal and business relationships when they do it offline.

Our free software includes utilities to seek out and destroy all remnants
of communications software on your computer (also works over a network).
It even removes that pesky little winsock.dll from your hard drive once and
for all!  Say good-bye to the World Wide Web and hello to the friends and
family you forgot you had! Our software, once run, remains memory-resident,
and like a background virus checker, protects your computer from
re-installation of telecommunications software.

Here's how the program works:

1. First you run the good-bye letter generation program which automatically
logs you into all your favorite online services and posts good-bye notes to
the news groups and message areas of your choice. It encourages people to
call or even write you if they want to talk to you, and lets them know that
you're going to be okay, but that you're just going offline. (It even logs
you into your favorite chat areas and makes witty parting comments, and
leaves requests with systems administrators to cancel your account.)

2. Our program recognizes every version of every known communications
software package for DOS, Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2 and Unix,
(and there's even a special version for you Mac Users.) It will remove all
of these programs and overwrite your hard drive with null strings so they
can't be undeleted. And just so you don't try to sneak in through a back
door like an automated check payment window through a program like Quicken,
our software also removes the serial communications abilities of all
financial software and related software.

3. Hardware reconfiguration. Our software alters your system configuration
so that no device which even remotely resembles a modem will ever work on
your computer again. It installs a "listening program" as a permanent TST
so that even if your computer encounters a modem tone over a network, your
computer will immediately reboot, thereby keeping you effectively offline,
even in a network environment.

4. Hardware destruction. The next step is to destroy your modems. This is
best done with a hammer. We recommend a hammer because we know you will
start to feel in that destructive release the first real joy of your new
life offline.  With each crushing blow, we encourage you to think of the
countless hours you've wasted, the completely irrelevant information you
have gathered, and the many people who completely mis-represented themselves
to you when you were online.

5. Finally, our software brings you a brief lesson on meditation to help
you begin to relax without being online. It also includes a list of things
that you can do offline, like feeding your cat that you forgot you had,
watering the plants, doing the dishes, seeing your friends in person,
writing notes on pieces of paper, calling your parents on their birthday
instead of sending e-mail. The list includes more than 1,000 offline living
tips.

We're sure you'll agree that this software is the best of its kind for
getting offline quickly and staying this way.

To get your free software, please send a hand-written note to:
America Offline, inc. 4578 Chestnut Drive, Emporia, KA 83903.
And please include a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Please specify your operating system and 3.5 or 5.25 inch disks.

Note: Our software is not available on CD ROM, we do not have a support BBS
or a Web page or even a fax machine.

OUR SOFTWARE IS NOT AVAILABLE ONLINE. UPLOADING IT IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN!

© 1996 Peter Langston