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 LEGALDIS.DOC which is dated December 31st, 2107. Clearly that date isn’t right, probably because the time and date was not set or not set correctly upon boot on the computer this was saved. This would have been in DOS after all. However, there is a date in the message of 23-SEP-1985 so within a couple of days I’m sure that’s when this was saved. This appears to be a notice sent from Delphi to SIG managers with a legal disclaimer that should be shown to a user before they are allowed to download files.
See the previous post here.
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LEGALDIS.DOC
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read Name: DATABASE LEGAL DISCLAIMER Type: TEXT Date: 23-SEP-1985 17:44 by ELLISCO Size: 511 This is the text of a suggested disclaimer that should be seen by every user at least once before they are able to download anything contained in any SIG database. Keywords: DATABASE, LEGAL, GENERAL, RECOMMENDED ACTION> dis PLEASE NOTE: DELPHI and this SIG make no warranty, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. We make these materials available to the user solely on an "as is" basis. As such, the user shall hold DELPHI and this SIG blameless and not liable for any damages, direct or consequential, or loss of use or profit, or other event or omission which may be attributed to the use of abuse of the materials provided. ACTION>
