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

[David Payne <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's amazing that Harp-L is older than the public Internet. I can remember those days as a kid, calling up the BBS system. I normally used them to play games, etc. For those youngsters who don't know, there was no Internet in those days, really. There certainly were no Web sites. You had to call up a server on your modem, which did like 300 baud a minute in those days. It was usually just a computer at some guy's house, everybody called the computer at his house and if somebody else was on there, you couldn't use it because the line was busy. To find those, it was word of mouth only. You had to know somebody who had the phone numbers.  When I started college in 1994, I heard about the actual Internet for the first time. We had the internet, although there was nothing on it by todays standards, and GOPHER. The professors all liked GOPHER. It was menu-based and there was a lot of talk, I think about http being a fad and GOPHER was the
 real deal. I don't think I've ever even heard the word GOPHER since I graduated.
So, this was the beginning of what would later become the public Internet. 
When Nikola Tesla was working on creating the Internet back around 1905 at Wardenclyffe (he ran out of money), the Internet he conceived was wireless and something you could use to dictate messages to work (think e-mail) while you were on a train or something - or you could listen to some certain kind of music you wanted (you couldn't watch anything because the TV technology wasn't there yet. There were also some some attempts at Internet-like things in the 1930s, like when Crosley had this thing called the Crosley Reado where you could download the next morning's edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer overnight. But everybody's idea was the Internet, whenever we figured out how to do it, would be something businesses would use, as far as private folks, you might download the newspaper or something. 
But, when we get this, we start talking about harmonicas and things like that. 
There are so many things in the Harp-L archives. There are the words of many remarkable harmonica people who now belong only to the ages. Their words live on. It's as if they wrote them this morning and, as if, they were still with us. 
There's been a great deal of informaton passed over the years. The number of messages is daunting if you are looking for something specific, but the nuggets are there.
Someday, somebody should gather all of Joe Leone's posts and find a publisher. 

David Payne
www.elkriverharmonicas.com


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