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 AOLDBAS.DOC which is dated September 13th, 1985. It looks like news or “what’s new” information that might be displayed to a user when they entered the SIG.
See the previous post here.
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AOLDBAS.DOC
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27-AUG BRIEF USER CONTRIBUTIONS Do you have a favorite poem or fantasy? Perhaps a news item you would like to share? Have you tried using ASCII text to create pictures either suggestive, explicit, or just plain fun? If so, perhaps you might consider submitting them for addition to the databases here. The process is simple and there is help available at the ENCOUNTER> prompt. Simple select help from the menu. There is help for ASCII and XMODEM file transfers there. 23-AUG BRIEF ON CLOSE ENCOUNTERS There is a new article in the General Database titled: On Close Encounters and Compu-Sex. 12-AUG BRIEF "MS." MAGAZINE REPRINT Now available in the Noteworthy News database is a reprint with permission of the publisher of the article "Modems: Close Encounters of the Computer Kind" by Lindsy Van Gelder from the September 1983 issue of "MS" magazine. 12-AUG BRIEF ART GALLERY The Art Gallery database has a new submission by RODM which contains some various and interesting ways to say 'I love you'. Thank you, Rod! 11-AUG BRIEF POETRY & ART There are two new sections now available - Poetry and Art Gallery. Please submit your creative masterpieces <and non-masterpieces as well><grin> at your convenience!
