File hist97.txt from ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/pd2/hist9197.zip
by Prof. Timo Salmi, Wed 31-December-1997 07:31:44

Here is my highly subjective look back at 1997 from an archive site
maintainer's, a newsgroup's co-moderator's and Usenet newsgroups'
reader's point of view.

   January: The first MS-DOS file handled in 1997 for Garbo archives
was fi970101.zip "Phone number list of Finnish BBSes, J.Makinen".
Not much got done at Garbo at the beginning of the year since
Garbo's acting system manager Tommi Rintala was on vacation, I
was mostly occupied with other matters and we had no archivist for
Garbo. The Windows uploading sections remained closed. The MS-DOS
submission queues piled up.
   Had a misunderstanding and a heavy clash with the Vice President
of Jasc Inc. Fortunately this was subsequently amicably settled with
Keith's help. Consequently, I started carrying Paint Shop Pro for
Windows 3.1x at Garbo archives.
   A short-lived discussion in comp.archives.msdos.d whether or not
the shareware price should be displayed in Simtel.Net and Garbo
announcements.
   The by far most popular of my own packages has continuously been
tsfaqp.zip "Common Turbo Pascal Questions and Timo's answers" but
for a brief while in January my tsgif15a.zip "Timo's free collection
of 525 GIF labels for World Wide Web" topped it.
   Had to resort to making MS-DOS submissions available with only
virus checking without descriptions into Garbo's intermediate
/pc/queue directory.

   February: Joni Yrjana rejoined our Computer Centre to be Garbo's
archivist from the middle of the month. The old queues were so long,
however, that opening the Windows sections for new uploads had to be
postponed.
   There is far too much unsolicited and highly unwelcome junk/bulk
email advertising directed at users who post extensively on the
Usenet news. I changed my email address in my Usenet news postings
to {omit.NoEmailedAdvertisements.}ts@uwasa.fi.
   Took a skiing holiday.

   March: The alt.comp.shareware newsgroups gathered more and more
irrelevant noise in the form of fast buck, xxx come-ons, warez
babble and check me outs. Sigh!
   Garbo was in a bad mood throwing herself down on several
weekends.
   Garbo's long queues could not be resolved as well as we had
hoped. Archivist Joni Yrjana had to be rather occupied with user
problems as the University's Domestic Walli BBS.

   April: Started the month away from my email on a vacation
cross-country skiing in Lapland. Fabulous.
   Every now and then an author is dissatisfied with the directory
we assign for their program or the description we edit for Garbo's
file index. It is very rare however to get ultimatums involving the
law if we do not react. Such a case awaited in my mail box when I
came back partly since being away from my email I had not responded
quickly enough. Under the circumstances we permanently ceased
carrying the author's programs at Garbo. Usually, I try to be
understanding, but after a certain point is passed, as happened in
this one, there is no going back, ever.
   Garbo's MS-DOS upload queues moved too slowly because of the
scarce manpower. I had no alternative but to close also the MS-DOS
upload directory /pc/incoming. The Windows directories were already
closed in December 1996. This does not presage anything good.
   Sanford Wallace and his Cyberpromo have become the most notorious
origin of UCE (unsolicited commercial email). On the other hand
events of the scale of Cyberpromo's spamming activities draw
sufficient attention to the problem. Personally I use Unix email
filter to block known Cyberpromo aliases.
   The newsgroup alt.comp.freeware became inundated with grossly
crossposted debate on Netscape Navigator vs. Microsoft's Internet
Explorer.

   May: Reopened Garbo's MS-DOS incoming programs queues. The
Windows queues continue to stay closed to an indefinite future.
   My (computer-related) time was mostly taken up by converting some
further research publications of mine into the WWW format for
improved public exposure for them. The are listed at the following
URL: http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts#publicat .
   Set up an email password system to stem the tide of unsolicited
commercial junk email. This turned out to be a very good move. Also
had some useful exchanges of views about this solution in the
newsgroup news:news.admin.net-abuse.email .

   June: Garbo system manager Tommi Rintala left for a vacation. I
was beginning to see Garbo's future as bleak.
   The first comp.archives.ms-windows.announce anniversary. One year
gone by. The news:comp.archives.ms-windows.announce newsgroup was
created the 19th of June 1996.

   July: On vacation, mostly riding my bicycle. An image is
available as http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/gifsb/timobike.jpg . It was the
best summer in 170 years according to the meteorologists. I took
full advantage of the fact and by the end of the year the total
number of biking kilometers had accumulated into 8334 km, i.e. 5179
miles.

   August: A disgruntled author embarked on a protracted
disinformation campaign on the alt.comp.shareware newsgroups after
being ousted from the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP)
and after having his virus simulator rejected from Garbo archives.
The tantrum was most unfortunate, since he has many fine utilities.
But in the end the quality of his other utilities became moot when
he turned into nothing but another foul-mouthed abuser and become a
persona non grata at our archives.
   Our site UWasa has experiencing frequent newsserver problems. The
email password requirement I set up in May was turning out to be
absolutely invaluable against the unsolicited commercial junk email
rampant on Internet. Not a single inappropriate email message made
it to my principal mailbox during the summer. Excellent!

   September: Things do happen. A virus was detected in one of the
submissions to Garbo archives from a Rumanian author with a
non-returnable address. Another dilemma occurred when one of the
submitted, nice icon packages contained copyrighted cartoon
characters.
   Garbo queues overflowed and again I had no other choice than to
transfer the unhandled submissions to a public /pc/queue directory,
with only the virus checking done. BTW, that's where the virus was
found which I mention in the above.
   A sudden silence from the SimTel.Net archive. Turned out Keith
was on vacation.
   A burst of Turbo Pascal material to Garbo archives at the end of
the month. Garbo's most preferred section.

   October: Slightly revised Garbo's WWW pages and outlook.
   Released the last update of my list of MS-DOS FTP sites and
moderators ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/pd2/moder62.zip . I decided to
discontinue the maintenance of the list, since in this day and age
of WWW searches it is much less needed, and I did not have the time
to maintain it as well as I would have liked.
   Completed a scientific book in accounting on the long-run
profitability estimation methods together with a colleague.
Published it also as http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/smuc/smuc.html .
   Sigh! Programmers still keep falling for silly trolls as was
shown by the stupid "ADA and Pascal SUCK" debacle in
news:comp.lang.ada, news:comp.lang.c, news:comp.lang.c++,
news:comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso, news:comp.lang.pascal.misc and
news:comp.lang.java.advocacy.
   As you may know I am carrying at Garbo also the main file lists
of some other archive sites (Simtel.Net, Coast to Coast and
Winsite), partly in order to have myself a quick access to them from
Garbo. The lists are fetched to Garbo by an automatic script once a
week. Discontinued the chronically unsuccessful attempts to get
updates from Coast to Coast.

   November: A month of bad news. The vote on creating
comp.shareware.* newsgroups did not produce the required majority
and the much awaited creating of the groups thus failed.
   An irrelevant discussion in news:comp.lang.pascal.ansi-iso about
whose English sucks kept clogging the newsgroup. Well, that what the
kill files are for.
   Will 1998 be Garbo's last year? The Finnish network traffic is
carried by FUNET (Finnish University and Research Network). The
infrastructure and the traffic costs have until now been paid by the
Finnish Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Each university
has paid only a fixed sum. This policy is now under revision. The
universities will be paying by the traffic from the start of 1999.
Unless Garbo is given a preferential treatment because of its
international scope, year 1998 will be her last. The workforce
resources already have been a big problem and have seriously curbed
Garbo's operation, but the fixed nature of the university's
connection costs have allowed us at least keep Garbo running. As you
know, Garbo is a joint project of the Department of Accounting and
Finance, and the Computer Centre of the university. There is no way
the financial situation of the departments will allow continuing
donating the existence of Garbo to the net should the variable
costing scheme hit also her. However, there is some optimism that
Garbo would get the special treatment.

   December: The Linux update at Garbo caused a considerable
congestion at our lines by its popularity.
   Redesigned Garbo's WWW pages somewhat, including a different
background color for each of the platform sections.
   The fifth anniversary of news:comp.archives.msdos.announce on the
15th of December. Time flies.
   Had a very interesting discussion in comp.lang.pascal.borland
about "What to do about Crt.Delay runtime error 200 on fast
machines?" for the TP FAQ.
   Prepared as http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/garbo.html#faq Garbo
Frequently Asked Questions.

   Year summary: The latest, but rather a small annoyance on the
newsgroups in general seems to be the increasing number of postings
in non-standard text formats, mostly html format and such. Not
surprisingly there is some debate on a few newsgroups whether that
is a violation of netiquette or not. Also the number of postings
with all kinds of attachments and plugs seems to be on the increase.
   During the year news:comp.archives.msdos.d has grown increasingly
quiet. It seems that news:alt.comp.shareware has assumed much, if
not all of the role of the news:comp.archives.msdos.d newsgroup. As
for news:comp.archives.ms-windows.discuss many, if not most, of the
postings (often crosspostings) are requests for general advice on
various Windows problems, which really would be better at home in
the relevant Windows problems newsgroups. However, with the minimal
traffic in this newsgroup, it does not really matter. Incidentally,
the newsgroup which I enjoyed most to the chagrin of the its readers
was news:rec.humor where I post as Perfesser Pundit.
   For me personally, two aspects of the net became increasingly
important during the year. First, the WWW publishing, which I
utilize extensively in my scientific research, my teaching and at
the end of the year also somewhat in Garbo's maintenance. Second,
the email password system which I developed to counter spam turned
out to be the best idea I have had in years on the net scene. It
really has made my email useful again by stamping out the extra
noise. If you are interested in the technique, click the "nospam"
thumbnail on my home page http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/ .
   All things must finally come to an end. I do not think I shall
continue this history file diary in 1998. I have kept this diary
since 1991, but with with the problems at Garbo on the other hand
and with the repetitiveness and predictability of what goes on
Usenet news in these days on the other, things have settled down
much to routine. Besides, my computer interests have increasingly
shifted to the WWW scene.

The scope of the Garbo archives at the end of the year:
                 1996 1997       1996 1997
                 ---- ----       ---- ----
      /pc         675  712 Mb    5249 5463 MS-DOS files
      /windows    309  314 Mb    1045 1054 Windows 3.1x files
      /win95       30   31 Mb     113  114 Windows 95 files
      /linux        2  129 Mb       6   48 Linux files
      /unix        64   66 Mb     370  378 Unix files
      /mac         49   53 Mb     143  147 Mac files
      /next        40   40 Mb     132  132 Next files
      /X11          9    9 Mb      91   91 X11 files
      /ql           1    1 Mb     104  104 Sinclair QL files

Happy 1998!

   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
mailto:ts@uwasa.fi <http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/>  ; FIN-65101,  Finland
Spam foiling in effect.  My email filter autoresponder will return a
required email password to users not yet in the privileges database.
