My 25th Anniversary Gift to You

As we approach the 25th anniversary of this Digest (started 8-21-81) this next weekend, I decided to prepare another CD for you. We have had two of these in the past (1995-96 and again in 2002-03) and they were both 'best sellers' in the sense that I received a lot of orders for each of them. This time around, however, it is a 'do-it-yourself' type project: The entire collection of messages (about 125,000 of them, spanning a 25 year period) in comp.dcom.telecom have been collected and placed into MBOX format with the help of a Digest reader and are being made available for your review in zip format.

You go into our archives

and then into the back-issues files. Within the back-issues files, look for the category "25 years of c.d.t. messages in MBOX format." There you will see 25 files, labeled 1981 through 2006; each year is a zip file which when uncompressed using DOS will produce a new directory on your own computer entitled 'mail'. If the process goes as it should, each file uncompression you do should produce such a 'mail' folder with several thousand each mail files, sort of Usenet style reading. Unless you have _lots_ of storage space on your computer, I do not recommend trying to uncompress all the files at one time. But of course you can also send your output to a writeable DVD/CD if that is your preference.

Many of the messages also have hyperlinks in them, so I assume if you are connected to the net when you do this, you should get the benefit of the various links as well. The final year (2006) of this collection cuts off at the end of June. I hope you enjoy this 'one-stop shopping' collection of c.d.t. messages over the past quarter-century.

PAT