[LINK] Link's Influence

[Antony Barry]

On 28/03/2007, at 2:49 PM, Roger Clarke wrote:

>
> While acknowledging and dipping me lid to all the librarians  
> involved in launching link, I'm also interested in the speed with  
> which it became a broader community.
>
> Do you have any archives of the subscriber-list from them early  
> days, Tony?
>

The oldest I have is 20 March 1998 with and variable collections since.

>
> Incidentally, the official archive at:
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/
> starts only in late Feb 1995.
>

That's when we went from being maintained manually on  
wombat.anu.edu.au (wombats are bigger than gophers - right?) to  
majordomo.

> My personal email archives contain a couple of hundred emails that  
> appear (based on search and sampling) to be link postings, and that  
> date from late Feb 1995 back 15 months to 7 Dec 1993.  Shouldn't  
> they be in there too?
>

I didn't keep that data but Brian Denehy did. Somewhere tucked away  
in close to a gig of old files archives is an mbox file he sent me of  
the earlier period but he couldn't vouch for it's accuracy. I've been  
meaning to try and find it again. I actually did some years ago that  
I decided to tar everything up and there is all these tar balls...


> A copy of the oldest one I have is below - which is a memento in  
> its own right.
>
...

> Twenty million strong and adding a million new users a month, the  
> Internet is suddenly the place to be
> 2120 words

Them were the days. I remember looking at the growth rate and  
projecting that at the current rate the entire world population would  
be covered by 2001. Not that I thought it would. Back then Australia  
was at the cusp and within Australia ANU was near the front. Sigh...

Tony


phone : 02 6241 7659 | mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
mobile: 04 1242 0397 | mailto:tony.barry at alianet.alia.org.au
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