Very good, OM! Your post is a good reminder of what's really necessary to get the job done - basic tools and some motivation. Getting maximum speed requires buying into the closed-source proprietary protocol (which is hugely irritating to me, as this is ham radio, not corporate computing), but the open-source alternatives in the spirit of amateur radio are, as a friend recently put it, still at the science-project level.
Nice to be reminded that the retro stuff still works...
By the way, the other interesting digital protocol that has a lot of buzz these days, although not tied in with the Internet-connected gateways of Sailmail and Winlink, is PSK31. It works beautifully with low-power rigs and is very resource efficient... and intelligible communications can be extracted from very sloppy propagation conditions. I'm building a
NUE-PSK modem into my nav station.
73 de N4RVE