[Harp-L] harp-l's 33rd anniversary coming up on October 6 this year

[owner-harp-l@xxxxx]

So why are we called harp-l?  Because when this list began way back in
1992 we were hosted on a university computer at Western Kentucky
University, WKU used L-soft software for their list hosting.  L-soft is
still in business, they were associated with AOL for a long time and AOL
in their give back to the internet hosted free topical groups.  All their
lists were named like harp-l.  I lurked a list on AOL called plumbers-l.

When Chris Pierce finished his studies we were no longer able to stay on
the WKU site so we migrated and kept the name.  Hugh Messinger a harmonica
playing IT pro was involved in an internet hosting company called garply. 
Harp-l migrated to Garply so we were harp-l at xxxxx,com  Or that's what I
think we were.  Harp-l archive addresses are all munged so I cannot read
the entire address.  Time went by Hugh moved on and garply had issues. 
Danny Wilson valiantly vokunteered to run the list and he was followed by
Michael Polesky.  Garply had a disk crash a significant portion of our
archives were lost.  By then we had switched providers.  I cannot remember
who the new host was.  A nice guy out by an airport in a city I can no
longer recall.

The nice guy was over his head we were down a lot in that era.  I had
become the last man standing and was  quietly running harp-l.  I have a
partner in the venture.  Ben Nathanson.  Together we shopped server
providers and settled on rimu hosting where we are now.  I was able to get
ownership of the harp-l,com domain from a friend of Michael Polesky's 
He's an online harmonica teacher but I no longer recall his name or
business.  On or about the 5th of July 2005 harp-l was moved to rimu
hosting where were are now.

Software changes, l-soft then majordomo and now mailman.  We're still text
only.  Oh, that hard drive crash?  I tracked down the drive and had it
shipped to me.  It was I think out of a Sun SPARC  work station.  It was
recovered, Michael Polesky generously paid for it.  In Theory the archives
could be restored.  In practice it's tough because the formatting is
different and getting it all to look the same in terms of the dates etc is
a task.  Full height racked drive, it's a boat anchor and I still have it.

So here we are sporadic posting, fits and starts we still have over 2,000
subscribers, 2.601 actually.  I apologise for all the errors, the lack of
editing and the typos.  Oh a big thanks to all of the folks in the Hugh
era who volunteered to help admin the list, harp-l-workers was what we
were called.  Interesting that we've now been at rimu longer than anywhere
else.  harp-l-listowner