File hist95.txt from ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/pd2/hist9195.zip
by Prof. Timo Salmi Fri 29-December-1995

Here is my highly subjective look back at 1995 from an archive site
maintainer's, a newsgroup's co-moderator's and Usenet newsgroups'
reader's point of view.

   January: The question of Garbo copyrights and Garbo mirrors and
index services came up at three separate occasions. The University
of Vaasa welcomes mirroring. But, of course, our explicit permission
is required, since the University of Vaasa holds the copyright to
Garbo's directory structure and its index files. (I have checked
these facts and their ramifications with our lawyers, just in case.)
   A reasonably amicable, but a persistent discussion about
labelling programs with registration reminders as nagware at Garbo.
No real conclusion nor consensus was reached and the discussion
finally petered out. In our policy it naturally is the author's
privilege to decline us carrying his/her material at Garbo, while it
is up to us to make the final decision on what we write in our file
indexes about the packages which we agree to carry.
   Garbo uploads overloading problems were severe at the end of the
month.
   My spell as the chairman of the board of the computer centre at
the University of Vaasa ended. Stayed a member.
   The newsgroup news:comp.compression was cluttered with a
misplaced discussion about copyrights to Usenet postings.

   February: Problems with some uploads at Garbo including
copyrighted material from other authors. A typical copyright breach
by some authors is including pkunzip.exe in their packages without
PKWare's permission.
   Also problems with uploads setting prohibitive distribution
limitations. Our policy requires that uploads to Garbo must be
distributable also on the potential Garbo CD-ROMs without any extra
permissions or individual negotiations.
   A big hue and cry in the Finnish papers about pedophilia pictures
on Usenet involving the penet.fi anonymity service. The reference to
penet.fi turned out to be a crude forgery. The incident got even to
the Time Magazine and made the penet.fi maintainer Johan Helsingius
an instant net celebrity.
   The SUN SPARCstation IPX running Garbo was replaced Sun 19-Feb-95
by a Linux Pentium. The change was made for cost-effectiveness and
for more disk space. Unfortunately, Linux caused a lot of timed out
connections. The problem was solved when Ari got a new Linux kernel
for Garbo.

   March: Garbo's mailserver "mailserv" was replaced by ftpmail,
which is much more flexible and general.
   There was a fortunately false report about a virus in figlet
posted to news:comp.binaries.ibm.pc. But an understandable one,
since the version posted to alt.ascii-art indeed was infected
according to the CBIP moderator.
   All of a sudden the newsgroup comp.lang.pascal became so
inundated with a veritable onslaught of postings about Borland's
Delphi compiler that the newsgroup was practically choked.
   Some software problems at Garbo losing a week's download
statistics making us to lose some of them.

   April: The problems with Garbo's weekly download statistics
continued. We kept losing them.
   First Ari, then yours truly took a week's vacation away from
Garbo. The upload queues naturally piled.
   Cut the access to Garbo for an unauthorized and unresponsive
Garbo mirror.
   Was away on holiday for a week unreachable from the net.
Furthermore our main email computer chyde was exchanged for a more
powerful system, which prolonged the cut-off to some ten days.
   Had two new welcome requests for permission to mirror Garbo.
   There was some kind of an unfortunate delay in getting the voting
going for splitting up the by then hopelessly congested
comp.lang.pascal. It led to the 4th RFD :-(.
   Got around setting up a personal home page http://uwasa.fi/~ts/
to complement Garbo's recent home page http://garbo.uwasa.fi/.

   May: Changed the paths in Garbo upload announcements to the
standard URL format. This will make it very easy for the WWW users
to get files by just pointing and clicking.
   A poster in news:news.newusers.questions advertised to a $5.00
ftp, WWW, etc list on the news. Nothing wrong with that per se, but
Perry Rovers and I got only evasions to our questions about the
format and the origins of the information. Both Perry and I maintain
free FTP site lists which bear our respective copyrights. Hence our
concerns of what appeared to have some signs of a con.
   The CFV (call for votes) for the comp.lang.pascal reorganization
was posted. I was at first aghast about its apparent lack of solving
the Delphi inundation problem. Fortunately I was wrong, and was soon
constructively set right.
   The newsgroup alt.internet.services had a prank posting about "a
list of 100 sites that have 'good' pictures". An amazing number of
users fell for it posting head over heels "send me too" postings.
Someone must have been laughing his/her head off. Not funny.
   Spamming never ceases. This time we had for example "Are You
Named in Somebody's Will?" in several programming discussion
newsgroups.

   June: The newsgroup comp.lang.pascal was at last reorganized:
 comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso Pascal according to ANSI and ISO standards.
 comp.lang.pascal.borland  Borland's Pascal incl. Turbo Pascal (not Delphi!)
 comp.lang.pascal.mac      Macintosh based Pascals.
 comp.lang.pascal.misc     Pascal in general and ungrouped Pascals.
   Continued developing my WWW based pages and services after
succumbing to using Windows :-) for this purpose. Redesigned my
signature to accommodate WWW referencing.
   The number of Garbo mirror sites increased to 15.
   Closed Garbo's incoming directories towards the end of the month
until August because of our summer vacations.

   July: The latter part of comp.lang.pascal reorganization was
completed and the Delphi related newsgroups were created.
   Summer vacation for both the Garbo moderators. A nice summer.
Spent much of July with my favorite hobby, bicycling in the greater
Helsinki area.
   Celebrated my 50th birthday strictly off the net.

   August: First half on the month still more or less on vacation.
The theme of the rest of the month was improving Garbo's WWW
services. For example our MS-DOS section can be reached directly by
using URL http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/. WWW was the theme that became
to dominate my computer related activities for the rest of the year,
most importantly setting up WWW pages for information and teaching.
   Much discussion about binaries in news:alt.comp.shareware which
continued all through the rest of the year.

   September: Two CS apprentices, Sami Salonen and Joni Yrjana
joined Garbo moderation letting Ari and me to concentrate on our
other than routine Garbo upload handling tasks. Excellent!
   Much development on the home page of the Department of Accounting
and Business Finance of the University of Vaasa, Finland. It is
http://www.uwasa.fi/ktt/lasktoim/. Also continued to expand the WWW
hotlist references on my own how page http://uwasa.fi/~ts.
   Windows 95 naturally caught much attention. The effect spilled
over to non-windows newsgroups as well. We started considering a
separate Win95 section for Garbo.
   We put serious effort into the World Wide Web usage of Garbo. If
you have WWW capability, take a look at http://garbo.uwasa.fi. It is
possible to get files from us also by WWW http. In September this
was true for our MS-DOS, Windows, Unix, Mac and Sinclair QL
collections.
   Decided to overhaul the somewhat neglected Unix directories at
Garbo. Sami Salonen took on the task. The goals were "Descriptions
for all files in the Unix section, do away with the multilayer /unix
directory structure, and establish the WWW http option." This was
completed by the end of the month.
   Discussion in news:comp.archives.msdos.d about SimTel's author
phone and address disclosure requirements.

   October: A TBAV virus alarm on the consequently removed file
ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/filecopy/tcpy203c.zip. Even if the invoked
alarm is false, such incidents can cause unnecessary consternation.
The file was later restored when it turned out that this false alarm
is triggered by several targets, and there was no response from
Thunderbyte to the problem reports.
   Arranged a dedicated WWW URL http://garbo.uwasa.fi/Astro.html for
the astronomy images collection at Garbo.
   The number of Garbo mirrors world-wide increased to 22.
   My long term project to illustrate Garbo's MS-DOS section for WWW
access resulted into ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/ts/tsgifs10.zip as a
side product. (Later updated twice during the rest of the year.)
   A new newsgroup news:alt.comp.shareware.programming was created
for shareware authors' discussions.
   It is now very obvious that the binary MS-DOS distributiuon
newsgroup news:comp.binaries.ibm.pc is virtually dead. There has
been little else than the (automated?) monthly information postings
for ages. Not surprising though. This cumbersome method of
distribution is outdated by the more modern alternatives of FTP, WWW
and mail servers.
   The latest development on my own WWW front was that Ari Hovila
got me an access counter to my home page http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/

   November: The Hubble Space Telescope images seem occasionally to
be news even outside the net. This one was on the TV news
world-wide. Also on the Finnish evening news.
 171106 Nov 4 03:51 ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/gifstar/m16full.gif
 m16full.gif Star-forming gas pillars in M16 Eagle Nebula, Hubble
   Our CS apprentices Sami and Joni took care of most of the
submissions to Garbo, which was good and well, since Ari and I had
other projects.
   Garbo's mailing list was experiencing repeated problems. This
"majordomo" system often sent the upload announcements in duplicate
to the subscribers. Ari shut down the list for the time being.

   December: Garbo co-moderator Joni Yrjana's CS apprentice period
at the University of Vaasa was complete. He went back to studying.
He did a very nice job and will be a most welcome visitor in the
future.
   Nothing new under the Sun :-(. A spurt of misplaced binary
postings in news:comp.binaries.ibm.pc.wanted.
   The newsgroups news:comp.os.msdos.apps and news:comp.os.msdos.misc
were full of irrelevant advocacy chit-chat cross-postings for and
against various operating systems. Unfortunately, so many Usenet
users still are gullibly suckered into these obvious, cross-posted
"trolls" even if they have learned not to fall so easily for the
more obvious "make money fast"-like taunts.
   Got arj250.exe archiver to Garbo. Archiver programs naturally are
very popular. This one topped the download statistics for awhile.
   Further Garbo mirrors entered the scene. Rather strangely, it
took this long for the first one to appear in Great Britain. The
total number of Garbo mirrors is around 25 sites in December 1995.
   I must confess that we still haven't gotten around to making a
Windows 95 section at Garbo. The project has to be frozen altogether
until a more auspicious resource situation. On the Usenet news many
additional win95 newsgroups were voted into existence.
   Our PC apprentice Sami Salonen's spell at the University of Vaasa
was completed. My best thanks and compliments for the really
excellent work Sami has done for Garbo archives. The end of his
spell unfortunately also meant that like last year all new Windows
submissions to Garbo have to be declined due to scarce manpower.
Only updates of Windows programs that already are at Garbo can be
considered starting Wed 13-Dec-95.
   Keith Petersen left Coast to Coast to become the general manager
of Simtel.cdrom.com.
   As usual, when ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/virus/fp-221.zip came out
it was a huge success. Skulason's virus scanner has become the
hands-down number one protector against nasties for a number of
reasons including free usage for private users and the disinterest
in 1995 of some of the main competitors in their Internet
distribution strategies.
   Some of the debates from the criminal warez newsgroups for
distributing pirated fully commercial material overflowed to other
newsgroups.
   Ari and I were both away and unavailable during the Christmas
break. Nice and an exceptionally cold Christmas in Finland.
   Program of the year? Easy. Netscape 1.2 (even if not available
from Garbo :-).

   Predictions for 1996? WWW will become the dominant Internet tool.
Occasional, serious net congestions will occur despite increasing
band width. Commercial WWW services will emerge in earnest, but net
money will stay in the wings. There will be some beginning
secularization of Internet and the universal access throughout all
the net cannot be taken for as granted as before. The relative
importance of Usenet news will start to decline with the part of the
serious users looking more towards WWW home page presentations.
Unsolicited junk email marketing will become a serious nuisance for
net users. Win95 will catch on by its sheer momentum. Win96 will be
late. MS-DOS will stay around because of the huge old user base.
Advocacy debates will be as unending as ever. Crippling, nagware
tactics or some other form for registration exhortation will see a
new raise in offered shareware. Many shareware users will set up
their own one-product ftp/www sites and will stop uploading to
general FTP sites and BBSes. Despite this, the total number of
submitted material will stay more than we can conveniently handle.

The scope of the Garbo archives at the end of the year:
                 1994 1995       1994 1995
                 ---- ----       ---- ----
      /pc         450  528 Mb    4276 4730 MS-DOS files
      /windows    150  192 Mb     780  890 Windows files
      /linux           132 Mb          653 Linux files
      /unix        60   60 Mb     307  354 Unix files
      /mac         35   48 Mb     185  149 Mac files
      /next        40   40 Mb     135  134 Next files
      /X11          9    9 Mb      92   91 X11 files
      /ql           1    1 Mb      97  100 Sinclair QL files

That was it folks, for 1995. Happy New Year 1996. Cya!

   All the best, Timo

....................................................................
Prof. Timo Salmi   Co-moderator of news:comp.archives.msdos.announce
Moderating at ftp:// & http://garbo.uwasa.fi archives  193.166.120.5
Department of Accounting and Business Finance  ; University of Vaasa
ts@uwasa.fi http://uwasa.fi/~ts BBS 961-3170972; FIN-65101,  Finland
