Re: [Harp-L] 20 years ago today harp-l began

[chromboy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Happy 20th Harp-L !!

Wow !  Thanx for posting this interesting and amazing history that we've had.

Bravo and Kudos to all the owners/workers and spah for their tireless hrs and support. RIP our friends that have left us...

I miss Mike and Doug

This is a beautiful community and let's toast to 20 more yrs!

Long live Harp-L

All the best,
Rob Paparozzi



Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 6, 2012, at 8:56 AM, owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Here's a link to that first month and the text of the first post.  If you
> read past the first week things begin to pick up.  There are actually more
> than a couple of people still subscribed to harp-l who were around pretty
> much as the list began.
> 
> Harp-l began as a humble student run LISTSERV hosted on the Western
> Kentucky University computer systems.  The original listowner was Chris
> Pierce.  When it was no longer possible for Chris to run the list we were
> forced to find a new home, we settled at Garply systems and we were run by
> Hugh Messenger. An interesting time and the the list was hopping.  Our
> peak post volume occurred in this time frame.  Hugh's life changed and he
> was no longer able to keep up with the tasks of list ownership.
> 
> We continued to be hosted by garply and later the entity that garply
> became.  SPAH at the behest of Douglas Tate covered the costs of our
> hosting.  Initially Danny Wilson and then later a team of 3 took over the
> ownership duties.  The team of 3 included Michael Polesky, Ken Deifik and
> I believe Robert Gaustad.  Michael quickly became the last man standing
> and ran the list for years with the assistance of Jonas Karlsson and a
> small team of volunteers called harp-l-workers.
> 
> Our Garply hosting became less reliable as the company's interests,
> ownership  and focus shifted.  If you peruse the archives you'll notice a
> gap.  That gap was generated by a Garply disk crash.  Michael personally
> paid to have the disk replaced in a era when a replacement disk for a DEC
> Alpha was close to a thousand dollars.  Years later Michael paid to have
> the 2nd Garply disk data recovered when it was shipped to me loose in a
> box damaging the drive.  All of the harp-l archives including the gap era
> were recovered.  The reason they are not currently up is they have
> formatting issues.
> 
>> From Garply we moved to a new host whose name currently escapes me.  We
> did acquire the use of the name harp-l.com at that time.  Dave Gage
> generously obtained the domain name and paid those fees for years for us. 
> Our hosting was unreliable.  We were off line for a couple of months
> twice.  Membership being loyal we always bounced back but it cost us. 
> Other resources became available and harp-l has never again been as
> prolific as it was during the Garply era.
> 
> I've been involved with harp-l since the WKU era.  I became involved with
> the harp-l-workers group during the Garply era and during the middle of
> the Michael Polesky era I was in many senses the person running harp-l. 
> Frustrated with our hosting I teamed with Ben Nathanson another long time
> harp-l member to find a better more reliable way to keep harp-l afloat.
> 
> We ended up acquiring the harp-l.org domain name and used it to test
> hosting sites .  We got lucky and our second hosting choice, rimuhosting
> ended up working perfectly for us.  We set up parallel lists using the 2
> domain names.  This way we were able to beta test the new system while
> still maintaining the old list.  We switched from our long time mail list
> software, Majordomo, to our current system Mailman.
> 
> On July 30, 2004 harp-l was finally hosted on its own server with control
> over every aspect of the system.  We own the domain names thanks to Keith
> Graham and Dave Gage who generously allowed us to acquire them.  We are no
> longer SPAH supported, we've been independent since the server switch.
> 
> So thanks to Chris Pierce our founder and each and every one of you who
> helped along the way.  That a student run internet list started before we
> had web browsers still exists today is more than a minor miracle. 
> harp-l-listowner
> 
> 
> 
> http://harp-l.org/pipermail/harp-l/1992-October/date.html
> 
> WELCOME to all!!!
> 
> This listserver is for harmonica lovers/players/enthusists/and any one
> else that is interested.
> 
> This is not for any one particular style of music.  I hope that
> through this list much can be learned from all different forms of
> harmonica playing.
> 
> Blues, Jazz, Swing, Folk, Country, Rock, and ALL others are welcome.
> If you have questions or if you would like to share your ideas,
> experience and knowledge, please feel free.
> 
> It will probably start out slow, but after a while I think this list
> should work out well.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Good Harpin',
> 
> 
> Chris Pierce
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Chris Pierce                    |    In the Light and Sound of God
> Gilbert Hall                    |    Dragon's Gate Kung Fu:  Ja-Kari-Do
> 1505 Russellville Rd Rm 327     |
> Bowling Green KY  42101-3565    |    Departments of Biology and Chemistry
> 
>