RE: [Harp-L] Happy Anniversary Harp-l! - Archives



Robert Gaustad asks:

> what about the archives that are sitting on harpamps.com?

Those files are very much on my mind. They have in fact formed the earliest part of our archives, and what remains of them are our archives' missing piece. I am enormously grateful to three farsighted and generous people who preserved the files and made them available to us.

Keith Graham of harpamps.com began hosting a Harp-L archive at his own expense during the period when Harp-L's own archive was down, and he has been generous in making the files available to us, along with software that he created for them.

That an archive of any sort exists is a monument of love and well-placed paranoia on the part of two people both still on our list -- Garry "Indiana" Warren and Danny Wilson. In a time when disk space was scarcer than it is today, they made a point of saving the daily digests as a precaution. Garry also saved, when the opportunity arose, a direct offload from the old mail server.

Keith's archive is based on their files. Thanks to these men the history of the list -- back to October 1992 -- is preserved.

The old joke "if I'd have known I would live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself," is true here. There has been no set of archives handed down from owner to owner. We have been reverse-engineering archives from these Warren/Wilson/Graham files. Despite diligence and care, the vagaries of email and of the list itself have left small sections unrecoverable or missing, and although I perform the text reformatting by computer, the originals have subtle variations that require manual checking.

That is where the Micropolis drive was to have come in. There is something about a sealed box -- particularly one that was sought after and bargained for, a Lost Ark of ferrous oxide. Perhaps it...

That particular magic was not to be. But I am happy to trade an Indiana Jones story for a Indiana Warren story -- and a Danny Wilson story and a Keith Graham story. The devotion of individuals has made this list what it is -- day to day, and for the generations of players to come.

It's my plan to finish converting these files and to add them to the archives no later than the end of the year.






This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.