From garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/hist91.zip by Timo Salmi Fri 27-Dec-91

Here is my subjective look back at 1991 from an archive site
moderator's and cbip reader's point of view. It is crossposted to
the cbip newsgroups as an exception because the cbip reorganization
only took place in the middle of the year.

   January: University of Vaasa anonymous ftp archives moved to
garbo.uwasa.fi (a MIPS R2030 workstation) because the old archive
was running out of disk space, and the space was needed for our
University's other data processing tasks.
   Fridrik Skulason's fprot114.zip virus protection update came
out and at once topped our download list.
   The big download hit was, however, the StarGoose game from the
binary postings. This is an interesting phenomenon. Perhaps the fact
that there are relatively so few of these games for the PC makes
them popular, notwithstanding the fact eg StarGoose's response to
keystokes is sluggish compared to hundreds of similar or better
games for even the C64.

   February: A quiet month at archives until almost the end of
February. Then the Japanese LHa .lzh archiver version 2.10 hit the
scene. I used the author's patches to make it an English version,
and during the first ten hours lha210e.exe became more heavily
downloaded than the top programs normally are in a week.

   March: I'll best remember this month from the flak which my
postings of weekly garbo.uwasa.fi download statistics caused on net.
I ceased posting them and put them into downloadable files. My
general feeling about the whole episode was a surprise at the
inclination of people to complain about free services. March was an
unpleasant month in comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d altogether. For me things
totally boiled over later (in middle April), and there was a
trend-setting discussion about my postings in the news, most of it
supportive, though.
   The nice part of this month was shez60b.zip archiver shell
update, which come out after lull in the previously quite hectic
update rate. The new version had much small, but very convenient
improvements.

   April: The program of the first half of the month was without any
doubt Jeroen Schipper's ReadMail news & email & message reader.
Programs come and go, but some long-run favorites are always in
demand. McAfee's scanv##.zip keeps steadily near the top of our
download lists, and so (naturally) do the main archiving programs.
It's also typical that when there are no new big hits, users seem to
turn to downloading games.
   Blessfully things calmed down at the end of the month. On the
other hand, I was somewhat sorry to see the discussion on creating
offshoot newsgroup(s) from comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d wilt from a total
lack of momentum. (Fortunately this was taken up again later).

   May: The most interesting acquisition to garbo archives this
month was the Numerical Recipes Turbo Pascal code collection
(/pc/turbopas/nrpas13.zip) which I got directly from one of the
authors William Press.

   June: June saw at times a heated discussion on 7-bit vs 8-bit
editors. The discussion soon had some undertones of US versus
international culture, but (mostly) did not get all too personal.
   The big news was however, that comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d was divided
into three newsgroups on the 23rd of June 1991, and archives thus
finally got a newsgroup of their own comp.binaries.ibm.pc.archives.

   July: The long awaited new Zoo version 2.10 came out
simultaneously both as an MsDos and a Unix version. It had a good
compression, was a bit on the slow side, had an annoying bug in the
Unix version date-stamping, and had a much improved
self-documentation. The discussions about it in several newsgroups
revolved, perhaps a bit too narrowly, around compression
performances. The new Zoo soon became a standing download favorite
at our site.
   I resumed posting garbo download list in a monthly form, but now
to comp.binaries.ibm.archives, which I is now my preferred
newsgroup.
   The two new discussion subgroups cbip.archives and cbip.wanted
settled to their roles.  Not without problems, but reasonably
enough. On there other hand, the old binaries newsgroup cbip.d did
not adapt to the reorganization at all.

   August: I think that the attention of the world was directed to
the historic events more important that what was going on on the FTP
scene and UseNet news.

   September: Perhaps with the beginning of the new term, the
subjects of the postings in comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d got more and more
wildly off-topic (over 80% at one stage!) and the on-topic subjects
thus became a minority in the group. I was not just concerned of the
effect on established cbip.d itself, but the detrimental
side-effects on the development of the new sister newsgroups
cbip.wanted and cbip.archives. Despite continued notes on and off
the group the cbip.d postings subjects stayed hopelessly unruly.
   The bang of September was the cessasion of funding to Keith
Petersen's maintenance of SIMTEL20 archives. This was very
unfortunate news also for garbo.uwasa.fi because of the close and
useful cooperation with Keith. A hefty flow of petitions ensued. The
situation also immediately showed as an increase in the download
rate at garbo even if the SIMTEL20 files were available exactly as
before.

   October: Keith's task at SIMTEL20 was fortunately restored also
to everyone's relief.
   The long awaited Unix Zip zip10ex.tar.Z by Mark Adler, Rich
Wales, and Jean-loup Gailly came out, and became an instant success.
   The situation in cbip.archives and cbip.wanted postings improved
considerably, but in cbip.d the misplaced postings abounded so much
that I drastically cut back by participation in cbip.d.
   Garbo kept acting up so much, that we had to close the mail
server down for awhile.  Also SIMTEL20 was experiencing technical
problems.
   The find of the month, for me at least, was shrom18g.zip SHell
ROOM utility, which causes any application to swap to disk when
shelled from to MsDos. Very useful indeed with heavy applications.

   November: The new 4DOS version 4.0 came out and instantly became
very heavily downloaded. But zoo210.exe continued to be the long-run
download favorite. Of my own packages my Frequently Asked Questions
(tsfaq24.arc) was for once bypassed in a weekly download statistics
by two other text files of mine, that is a subjective review of my
choice of 21 best PD & SW MsDos programs (bestprog.zip) and a
collection of my own puns in English (tspun10.zip).

   December: McAfee virus scanner version 85 came out and had a
garbo record of about 500 downloads in one week. Looking back at the
whole year it is obvious that Rahul Dhesi's zoo and McAfee's scanv
are the biggest favorites.
   The comp.binaries.ibm.pc moderator Bill Davidsen announced his
retirement from moderating comp.binaries.ibm.pc, and called for the
selection of a new moderator.
   A new major site ftp.ulowell.edu appeared on the scene to take
care of games traffic with Brian O'Neill as the moderator. At garbo
we removed most of our games.

...................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi        
Moderating at garbo.uwasa.fi anonymous ftp archives 128.214.87.1
School of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, SF-65101, Finland
Internet: ts@chyde.uwasa.fi Funet: gado::salmi Bitnet: salmi@finfun
