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

[Ben Nathanson <bjnath@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.