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

[Clarke Comollo]

Thanks for all your efforts

> On Sep 20, 2025, at 7:14 PM, owner-harp-l at xxxxx wrote:
> 
> 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
>