From garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/hist92.zip by Timo Salmi Wed 30-Dec-1992

Here is my very subjective look back at 1992 from an archive site
maintainers's, a newsgroup co-moderator's and cbip discussion
subgroups (and later cam.d) reader's point of view.

   January: Brian 'Doc' O'Neill succeeded to Bill Davidsen as the
comp.binaries.ibm.pc moderator. Inevitably the discussion recurred
whether to continue posting in .zoo or go over to .zip. The nice
thing was that this time the discussion was analytical and mostly
calm and collected, and thus, for once, useful and interesting.
   Garbo that formerly run on a MIPS 2030 workstation, was
physically changed to run on a Sun IPX sparcstation. The traditional
garbo.uwasa.fi name was not changed to assure a sense of continuity.
   Rhys Weatherley rhys@cs.uq.oz.au joined me in maintaining the
list of MsDos FTP and their moderators.
   Looking back at 1991 we found out that we had just a little over
one million downloads in 1991 from garbo.uwasa.fi archives (all
public FTP directories told).

   February: Both SIMTEL20 and ftp.ulowell.edu (the games site)
where having technical problems and were unreachable at times.
   The hostageware concept surfaced out of the woodworks and was
heavily discussed in cbip.archives (a case for misc.legal.computers
really).

   March: We finally got a US mirror for garbo.wasa.fi archives when
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA wuarchive.wustl.edu
got the disk space to mirror us. My compliments to Chris Myers.
   Our Australian mirror friends moved from rana to archie.au.
   The Michelangelo virus scare showed as a sharp peak in the virus
utilities downloads from Garbo.  Especially scanv86b.zip fared very
well and had about 800 downloads in a single day before the trigger
date. Without minimizing the scare in the least, I fail to
understand why it was Michelangelo of all the plethora that managed
to attract the newsmeadia.
   I started a new area by introducing the /ql directories for the
ill-fated Sinclair QL.  In the mid 1980's Sinclair QL was well ahead
of its times in the home computer market with its 32 bit Motorola
68000 processor (eg no silly 64K limits in programming arrays).
Later the QL withered into obscurity with a few faithful followers
remaining. I did this out of nostalgia, because many of my own
publicly distributed PC programs originated from my own QL era. The
tepid interest in the area well paralleled the dismal fate of the
Sinclair QL.
   SIMTEL20 came out on a CDROM.
   The end of March saw yet another bogus PKZIP release this time
called 2.01.  It had been patched from the 1.93 beta test version.
In a way PKWare's own fault with their advertised 2.0 turning into
months (years? :-) of waporware. By the end of the year the genuine
new version still has not out.
   The discussion about which is the 'best' archiver started another
predictable round which blessfully soon lost impetus.
   An unsavory row arose about a publicized crack of a program
called Alchemy.  (I must confess that I wouldn't otherwise have
known of a program called Alchemy. I did not participate in the
discussion).

   April: The main Windows FTP site cica.indiana.edu was
experiencing disk problems and was unavailable.
   The output rate of comp.binaries.ibm.pc was still on the torpid
side.
   My Turbo Pascal routines unit collection was included on the
companion diskette of Doug Cooper's. Oh! Pascal! for Turbo Pascal
6.0 (3rd. Ed.), W.W. Norton & Co, N.Y., 1992.
   I started collecting a list of MsDos PD & SW utilities authors
reachable by email on/from InterNet.
   Compliments and flames came in at their average rate with the
former fortunately in majority. The boon of archive site moderation
and the curse writing a lot on the news.
   We were approached on putting garbo.uwasa.fi MsDos archives on
CDROM.

   May: Garbo archives were published on a CDROM. A quote from
rab@sprite.berkeley.edu (Robert A. Bruce): "The Garbo Archive, from
the University of Vaasa, Finland, is now available on CDROM.  It
contains about 400 meg of software, 250 meg for Msdos and 150 meg
for Macintosh."
   We had (this time a quality) discussion about the problems with
the comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d charter.
   The big hit of the month was Wolfenstein 3D at the games site
ftp.ulowell.edu and the cbip.

   June: Sigh! Again binaries posted to cbip.d and the inevitable
subsequent wrangling.
   Some of the usual false alarms.  This time of scanv virus scanner
being a trojan in disguise :-), and of a zoo 2.11 being available
somewhere.  These update hacks are a slight, but a constant
nuisance.
   Program reviews were gradually becoming more usual in
cbip.archives which is a good development. Still they are just a
trickle. Unfortunately they later ceased and by the end of the year
the situation was still largely the same. Hopefully 1993 will be
more productive in this respect.
   I had my wires unfortunately crossed with an uploader who kindly
offered us gif pictures of locomotives, but try as I would to
explain it, the uploader would not understand to my request that
they must be accompanied with educational history files in order to
be considered for Garbo. (Garbo does not carry plain recreational
material.)

   July: I was on "holiday" the whole month away from Vaasa in
Helsinki, but still connected through the server at the Helsinki
Technical University. I could not handle Garbo uploads, since I had
only an old Zenith Z-181 dual diskette laptop and a 2400 bps modem
without error correction with me. Harri, who also was on vacation,
kept Garbo upload announcements going in cbip.archives.
   Archive sites moderator's mail box is daunting.  I had the Z-181
away for display repairs for three days. When I got back there was
almost a hundred messages waiting, not counting the infolist
messages. And all this in the dead of the summer. I am more and more
compelled to use reprocessed replies since some themes keep
recurring.
   Although this is somewhat beside the point, I bought a Dell 325N
25MHz/4Mb/80Mb notebook after about one week of intensive checking
what was on offer in Helsinki. It will be interesting also from the
point of view that it runs MsDos 5.0 while I will continue to use
3.30 on my 386 desktops. At least I'll be better able to test the
compatibility of some of my programs.

   August: Back at Vaasa.
   The cbip.d newsgroup started a discussion whether the cbip
discussion subgroups (cbip.archives in particular) should be made
moderated. Some thoughts were given to renaming cbip.archives to
a moderated comp.archives.msdos (+.d), but the discussion gradually
lost momentum. One result of the debate was that I prepared FAQs for
comp.binaries.ibm.pc.archives and comp.binaries.ibm.wanted.
   Perhaps inevitably yet another round of discussions about PD,
shareware and fully commercial programs. The discussion took place
in comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc, comp.os.msdos.apps, comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d.
   The PKZIP 1.93 compatible zip and unzip for multiple platforms
including Unix and MsDos was released by the Info-ZIP programming
group. The zip was quickly followed by an update of this excellent
utility because of some initial bugs. I am pleased to have been able
to be a small part in testing for the fix.

   September: The Garbo harddisk accommodating the /pc /unix /win3
/win31 and /ql directories crashed Friday the 5th of September
rendering Garbo virtually inoperable for the weekend. Most, but not
all of the material could be saved by copying back from the mirror
sites. But the material in the /ql Sinclair QL directories by the
authors other than I was totally gone.
   The wording of Joseph (Yossi) Gil's public notes to cbip
misposters was reworked as a joint effort off the news to reflect
the positive aspects of guidance on posting.
   Once again a discussion on the CBIP newsgroups arrangements with
no conclusion.
   NCTUCCCA.edu.tw Campus Computer Communication Association
National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, started mirroring Garbo.
A very welcome addition.
   Garbo upload announcements were put on hold starting Sun
27-Sep-92 awaiting some kind of a positive action to get a moderated
comp.archives.msdos.announce and comp.archives.msdos.d newsgroups to
substitute cbip.archives. SIMTEL20 announcements were suspended Tue
29-Sep-92 for the same reason. The chain of events that lead to this
somewhat drastic decision and the ensuing events remains recorded in
garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/post11.zip.

   October: The RFD (Request For Discussion) to create
      comp.archives.msdos.announce (moderated)
      comp.archives.msdos.d
was jointly prepared by a group of interested parties in a
discussion spanning at least 300 email messages. It was kindly
posted by Samuel Ko, who is a familiar figure on these newsgroups.
Samuel offered to take on the task of seeing it through.
   Keith Petersen set up a mailing list (msdos-ann) for interested
users for SIMTEL20 and Garbo upload announcements after we withdrew
them from comp.binaries.ibm.pc.archives because of the continued
strife and non-conformance of the said newsgroup. Judging from the
number of subscribers the list was an instant success. The
instructions for entering were put among other places to
garbo.uwasa.fi:/pc/pd2/post11.zip. (The users getting the newsgroup
comp.archives.msdos.announce should unsubscribe, since it is a
subset of the announcements on the news, and causes quite a load on
the sending host.)
   I decided that UseNet was becoming an increasingly unfriendly
place, that I had been exposed far too much by giving away free
advice and services in the news. Consequently I lost some of my
motivation and started economizing on my public support until the
CAM newsgroups were founded in mid December.
   Keith introduced a convenient digest form to the msdos-ann
mailing list. This means that the announcements are bunched rather
than sent one by one.

   November: After an unfortunate false start the voting on
comp.archives.msdos.announce and comp.archives.msdos.d got under way
the 10th of November. And as fate had it, the recipient machine's
hard disk crashed at the outset, so the first votes bounced. Mr.
Murphy was having a field day.
   Keith Petersen and Hannu Hirvonen introduced me to automatic elm
mail filters to redirect or discard unwanted email. Very handy
solving e.g. my longstanding problem of avoiding the fortunately
very few pestering users not liking my activities on the net. This I
should have had long ago. It is absolutely what the doctor ordered!
   There was a relatively lively discussion in cbip.archives about
privacy vs. using one's id as the password for FTP. (Garbo asks for
such a practice of its downloaders).
   The number of subscribers to the SIMTEL20 & Garbo announcements
msdos-ann list reached 3000 the 21st of November.
   lds_10.zip lossless datacompression sources kit collected by Nico
de Vries became an instant hit at Garbo.
   Garbo got an additional 1 gigabyte disk bringing up the total
storage capacity to 3 gigabytes.

   December: End in sight? :-).  By the end of the deadline 7th of
December 985 people had sent in their ballots in response to the
Call For Votes to replace comp.binaries.ibm.pc.archives. The results
were overwhelming:
                                 YES    NO    ABS   YES-NO
 comp.archives.msdos.announce    939    44      2     895    95.5%
 comp.archives.msdos.d           903    69     13     834    92.9%
Thus the suggestion passed with the biggest tally ever for any new
newsgroup as far as I know. We seem to have made a kind of a
history.
   The new newsgroups were subsequently created the 15th. There has
some last minute hassle about the ".announce" in the first
newsgroup's name, but that was fortunately solved by the net
administration.
   The effect on Garbo download frequencies of the announced files
was dramatic. It also showed on the amount of email I get. All of it
welcome, so far. A new problem is that this seems to bring in
questions that were so vaguely phrased, that I sometimes have
difficulties to understand what the query is about. It also seems to
bring in occasional questions which are totally outside my scope and
my know-how.
   By the morning of Wed 30-Dec-1992, that is in fifteen days, there
were 176 postings in CAM.announce, and 235 in CAM.d. The system
achieved one of its purposes even better than I dared to hope for.
Of these 235 postings only five were unambiguously in the wrong
newsgroup. There was a brief exchange about my posted advice on
these.
   The big hit of the couple of last days of the year were four
Galileo space probe images I obtained from the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory archives.
   In shareware programs the nagware tactics seem to be on the
increase.  We can only hope that it won't be a big trend in 1993.

..................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi      Co-moderator of comp.archives.msdos.announce
Moderating at garbo.uwasa.fi anonymous FTP archives 128.214.87.1
Faculty of Accounting & Industrial Management; University of Vaasa
Internet: ts@uwasa.fi Bitnet: salmi@finfun   ; SF-65101, Finland
