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. I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25″ disk drive and extracting the contents a while back. Since then I have been posting the contents here.
Based on the contents, at least some 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.
A specific definition 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 whatever terminal program you used on your computer to dial in to Delphi’s servers. Many of these disks have forum messages, e-mails and chat session logs. All of this is pre-internet stuff and I don’t know if there are any archives in existence today of what was on Delphi in the 1980s. In any case, much of this stuff would have been private at the time and probably wouldn’t be in such archives even if they existed.
This post includes the contents of DM0930.DOC which is dated September 30th, 1985. This file is shorter than most have been thus far and looks a little chaotic. The first half looks like a typical mail reading session similar to a number of previous posts but it looks like there are garbage characters in it…maybe there was noise on the line or something. The mail seems to be related to a Wang SIG with mention of the Wang 2200 MVP. The Wang 2200 line of computers were minicomputers used in business settings usually running programs written in BASIC.
The second half looks like the user is operating directly with the file system. I don’t know what the WS> prompt indicates but the disk name and file listing (with versioning) looks like VMS to me. That would makes sense as at the time, VMS seems like a likely candidate for being the backbone of online services like Delphi.
See the previous post here.
===
DM0930.DOC
===
list mail.mai
h[v6Allan,(I'm so glad to see a Wang sig on Delphi!KI am operations manager for
a ra
ther large insurance agency in Jacksonville@and we have had the Wang 2200 MVP, u
sing Redshaw software, since
January 126 w llHHP T\T\U
(
6
8
4V<vdvl\tdv4vdvvv ws="">
WS> dir
Directory UD_2:[0RRG1HTF9]
DIST.SIG;1 2/3 28-AUG-1985 17:42
MAIL$0004008E37B875AE.MAI;1
10/12 23-SEP-1985 20:13
MAIL$0004008E38ADC037.MAI;1
5/6 25-SEP-1985 01:29
MAIL$0004008E3979B2B2.MAI;1
14/15 26-SEP-1985 01:49
MAIL$0004008E3A2A48C4.MAI;1
8/9 26-SEP-1985 22:53
MAIL$0004008E3A578C2A.MAI;1
8/9 27-SEP-1985 04:17
MAIL$0004008E3D25E95A.MAI;1
4/6 30-SEP-1985 17:59
MAIL.MAI;1 120/120 22-SEP-1985 21:04
Total of 8 files, 171/180 blocks.
WS> ^Z
DISCONNECT
</vdvl\tdv4vdvvv>
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