A summary for those that haven’t been keeping up with this series:
I found a number of 5.25″ disks at a thrift store a number of years ago (sometime in the late 1990s to the best of my recollection). I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25″ disk drive and extracting the contents a several years back. Since then, I have been occasionally posting the content here.
Based on the contents, most or all of these disks were apparently once owned by someone named Connie who used to run the “Close Encounters” Special Interest Group (SIG) on Delphi in the mid 1980s.
The following description of this SIG was found in a document on one of the disks: “This SIG, known as ‘Close Encounters’, is a forum for the discussion of relationships that develop via computer services like the Source, CompuServe, and Delphi. Our primary emphasis is on the sexual aspects of those relationships.”
This service was text based and was accessed via a modem and whatever terminal program you had available for your computer to dial in with. Many of these disks have forum messages, e-mails and chat session logs. All of this is pre-internet stuff and I am not aware of any archives in existence today that contain what was on Delphi in the 1980s.
This post includes the contents of AUG84.DOC. This appears to be a report that gives details on the usage of the SIG (how many hours each user spent in the SIG, etc.). There are two SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that have been mentioned in these files. One is the “Close Encounters” SIG and the other is the “Friendship Circle” SIG though I’m not entirely sure they were different. “Close Encounters” may have evolved from “Friendship Circle”. In any case “Closed Circle” is mentioned in this report but maybe there is a name and an alias or something. Based on the relatively small number of users in this report, this may have been the first month this SIG was operational.
This file is dated September 2nd, 1985 and was in a subdirectory titled “SIGUSAGE”.
=-=
AUG84.DOC
=-=
—
From: KELLY 12-SEP-1984 16:37
To: CABUYS
Subj: August Usage Report
August Usage report, by time, for Closed Circle Sig
===================================================
PRIME OFFPRIME
USERNAME SESSIONS Minutes Minutes
-------- -------- ------- --------
CABUYS 55 124 1001
DEOGBURN 3 0 73
HANSOLO 1 0 5
JOHNMYSELF 15 6 214
QUICKRODNEY 1 0 16
SEB7 3 0 7
SPARKY 2 0 56
SUMMER 2 0 86
---------------------------------
Totals in minutes 82 130 1458
Totals in hours 2.17 24.30
