Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #10 – DM0915.DOC

in #retrocomputing2 years ago


A summary for those that haven't been keeping up with this series:

I found a number of 5.25" disks at a thrift store a number of years ago (we are talking late 1990s probably). I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25" disk drive and extracting the contents a few years back. Since then I have been posting the contents here.

Based on the contents, most or all of these disks were apparently once owned by someone named Connie who used to run the “Close Encounters” Special Interest Group (SIG) on Delphi in the mid 1980s.

A description of this SIG was found in a document on one of the disks: "This SIG, known as 'Close Encounters', is a forum for the discussion of relationships that develop via computer services like the Source, CompuServe, and Delphi. Our primary emphasis is on the sexual aspects of those relationships."

This service was text based and was accessed via whatever terminal program you had available for your computer to dial in to Delphi’s servers. Many of these disks have forum messages, e-mails and chat session logs. All of this is pre-internet stuff and I am not aware of any archives in existence today that contain what was on Delphi in the 1980s.





This post includes the contents of DM0915.DOC which is dated September 15th, 1985. I believe that ‘DM’ in this case stands for Direct Mail which appears to have been Delphi’s version of e-mail. This document contains several such e-mails from September 11th through September 15th, 1985. Subject matter includes polls, SIG management, and various personal conversations including a couple of melodramas. This file appears to be a captured terminal session and a couple of the e-mails showed up in the previous post but most is “new” stuff.

See the previous post here.

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DM0915.DOC
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Also posted here in its complete form with reasonably formatted text that is pretty close to the original formatting: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2022/07/14/digital-archaeology-floppy-disk-10-dm0915-doc/

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The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @darth-azrael, @lindoro ) sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.

Wow, this is really digital archeology! BTW, how can we verify you're the author of the sourced content? I found out this was also posted on Steemit about 4 years ago.

I found this content posted on Steemit four years ago.

Could you provide a link please?

Here it is https://steemit.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/digital-archaeology-codex-floppy-disk-8-part-1

I was interested in knowing if he/she is also the same person/author of the content posted on the site he linked at the end of the post and see if all of this fulfills the curation standards.

EDIT 1:

This is the right link: https://steemit.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/digital-archaeology-codex-floppy-disk-8-part-14

Thank you.. let's see what OP has to say.

I see hive users sometimes reposting steem posts..though it is frowned upon and can receive downvotes because of that..

Well, his website is linked to his hive account though. @eniolw

I updated the previous comment with the right click. I think I deleted the "4" at the end by accident.

It's the same account (darth-azrael) so it's pretty easy to see I'm the same author. However, it's not the same content. I've been going through and posting the contents of different files (of which I am NOT the author of, I just rescued them from ancient disks, but that's all explained if you read the post). However, that content (which is the unique part) is mostly just summarized by me and then partially posted as an image because I haven't figured out a good way to post it as text with reasonable formatting on hive. For example, if you follow the last link you can see it posted on my wordpress site. The contents of the file is included there in text format using the PRE tag to make it appear with the same format/spacing/etc. as the original. Hive seems to recognize that tag but it makes a mess of the text whether I use it or not.

The intro text is generally the same between posts because there is no reason to change it. I could leave it off instead of repeating it but without context it would make it kind of confusing.

As far as posting on steem, I started there before hive existed so those old posts are still there in one form or another. I also occasionally still repost to steem. Not sure why that would be frowned upon or deserve downvotes on hive though. As it is, I post there far less than here and am falling further and further behind. Those posts also tend to point back to hive one way or the other.

The problem with reposting old steem posts on Hive is it's considered recycling. I get using parts of a old post like the intro you pointed out. Just like I do not go back a few years and just reuse old posts. That would not be acceptable on Steem back then, nor is it now on Hive. I hope you can see how that can be an issue.

I do not repost old steem content on hive.

Okay cool.. that is what the commenter was pointing out.