You cannot believe the amount of bullshit that some of the Ol' Boys put out
on the Internet about the history and "rules" on the developing of the
broad net and how people must behave. This is one way they preserve power.
People who in any way challenge the "club" get pronounced "clueless
newbies," "net abusers," and other less charitable things. Within this,
however, there might be some element of truth insofar as history really
does exist and certain proprieties of behavior do exist.
The point then is to be able to separate the signal from the noise.
That's where you and Yoda Keebler come in. You especially (and Yoda to a
lesser extent) know the real early history because you lived through it
and are willing to share it. I will sometimes need accurate sources of
information about the T.A.P. and other "pre-Internet" periods and want to
be able to get it from people like you, Yoda, and others (subject, of
course, to your own time schedules, work loads, and needs.)
Onto a third point: I am not terribly turned on by the WWW. My idea of a
good source of information is the phone book, not colored glossy ad pages
in a magazine. I have been exploring the uses of ftp as a major source of
data distribution. ftp sites are far faster to "program," get up on a
foreign server, and debug. They also deliver data faster to the end user
than does the web.