Telecom Digest archives questions [TELECOM]

All,

I had a discussion tonight with Bill about our archives. As most of you are aware we have long maintained our own set of archives here:

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1981 when Sergey and Larry were doing whatever 8 year-olds did in 1981 and Google Groups did not exist. If we wanted an archive we had to do it ourselves. I can't speak for everyone, but going back and reading the old archives has been like a trip down memory lane. I remember when we had The Phone Company and would wait until 11 PM to call our grandparents to save on toll charges. Comparing 1981 to 2009 is really stunning.

A couple of years ago I made the archives available in mbox

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because I wanted them in that format to facilitate my walk down memory lane. Since I had already done the work, sharing it was the obvious next step.

Since that time Pat fell ill and since the exercise to put the digest in mbox was more of a rearview mirror and I didn't do it going forward. Here are our two questions:

  1. Should we continue to maintain our own archives or should we point people to
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    ?

  1. Is there any interest in making the current and future archives available in mbox?

I am going to defer question #1 to Bill. I have no strong opinions either way. On #2, as I told Bill, if even one person wants the archives available in the highly portable mbox format, I'm glad to do it.

John

Reply to
John Mayson
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I would strongly argue in favor of continuing to maintain the existing archives.

Google groups is nice to have, but it dosen't have the ability to intelligently group a set of articles, based on some loose criteria, without picking up some extra cruft along the way.

I find mbox to be a very useful format.

One of my major frustrations with Yahoo groups is the lack of any bulk download capability, or any way of importing group archives into a offline reader, other than saving individual posts.

Reply to
Bob Vaughan

There is a widely available perl script that downloads en masse from Yahoo into mbox format.

One caveat is one's Yahoo account can get "locked out" for awhile if too much is downloaded at one time.

A Google search on "yahoo2mbox" will point you to the perl program and also many forums discussing how to get-around Yahoo's restrictions.

***** Moderator's Note *****

Before you go to the trouble, remember that the digest's archives are already available in mbox format, either from the web page, or from me if you need something more recent.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!

We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.

Reply to
Thad Floryan

Regarding the archives, I would like to say that having the Western Union Technical Review and other materials are a major asset.

Those who built and maintain these archives deserve a big THANKS.

As an aside, that 11 pm discount time was originally midnight; then they moved it to 11 pm. The 11 pm discount, was part of a new major long distance rate overhaul. IIRC, at that time introduced (1) a third large discount period (in addition to day and evening) and (2) one minute charging instead of the three minute minimum, and (3) applied to dial-direct calls only, operator handled calls cost more. This was introduced in the early 1970s that reflected virtually the whole country had DDD. (Those that didn't have DDD and those who had trouble placing a call and needed operator help still were charged DDD rates.)

It is important to note this was a major rate reduction. Critics of the old Bell System who claim divesture and "competition" was necessary to reduce toll rates ignore measures like this.

Reply to
hancock4

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