Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: jfoust on February 17, 2015, 01:15:12 AM
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From '85 until '94 or so, I saved my transcripts from visiting the Amiga communities of CompuServe, PeopleLink, Delphi, Genie, BIX, the Well, etc.
I've thought about writing some code to parse these text files to reconstruct the message threads or file archives from these forums, and making them available on a web site.
Out of a concern for file space on floppies, I know I would often edit these text transcripts and remove posts that I didn't want to save - so I know I didn't save everything.
Did anyone else save transcripts of their ASCII modem surfing?
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Only if I was chatting with a hot girl!! ;)
(http://progamereviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet.jpg)
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No
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Did anyone else save transcripts of their ASCII modem surfing?
In my neck of the woods we call that "evidence" so, no, I never kept any of mine.
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http://textfiles.com/
Is a vast repository of old online materials, mostly from BBS and similar rather than commercial online services. Everything from art, to lit, to HPAC, it's all there.
Will keep you reading for hours on end if you're a fan of the old dialup online days.
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Yes, I know Jason of textfiles.com and he's interested in this topic, too. He says he hasn't found anyone else with saved transcripts. Surely I can't be the only one. I dunno - I may be a digital packrat, but a decade of near-daily surfing of pay services only consumed a shoebox full of 5 1/4" floppies holding Zip archives of text files - maybe 300 megs, and when expanded, back to four or five times that size.
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@jfoust
I never used pay services, but I kept quite a lot from local BBSes. At least one BBS I called had Fido message boards, so probably I have a little bit from Fido as well.
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Did anyone else save transcripts of their ASCII modem surfing?
I have some spotty saved messages from the old Compuserve Amiga forum days. Mostly news stuff, hardware stuff, and humor. ;-) Some of it is on my pc in the image of my 2000's HD or ADFs of floppy disks from those days. I have't looked at it in years.
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hasn't found anyone else with saved transcripts. Surely I can't be the only one.
I think you're unique in the length of time you've managed to preserve such data. I also used to save session data for reference, but over time such floppies disks were eventually reused or discarded.
I do have one "museum piece". I have a complete backup of the Amiga BBS I ran roughly from ~1993-1996 as it sat at the time I took it off line. Old threads, file archives, fidonet (I think), menus of color ansi art, users... all there in a capsule. Maybe not terribly impressive because with the internet coming on at the time, traffic and content had slowed considerably. I restored the data and fired it up 2 years ago to see if it still worked... yup.
Plaz
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I can't believe my archive is unique. I'd like to think some of the forum sysops kept copies similar to mine.
As for my last desktop Amiga, I imaged the hard drives and can run them as-is in emulation under Windows.
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Here's a sample from my archives... I'm sure I have older ones, but there ya go...
#: 291265 S3/Hot News and Rumor
19-Mar-97 06:16:57
Sb: Amiga 97 Report
Fm: Pat Larkin 74246,1077
To: All
This is your far-flung correspondent reporting on yet another great Amiga
show, this time Amiga 97, hosted by the Gateway Amiga Club (GAC) of St.
Louis, Missouri.
Nine members of the Amiga Society of Kentuckiana (ASK) made their way from
Louisville, Kentucky to St. Louis on Saturday March 15 for the first day of
the show; seven by car and two by plane. We got on the road a little before
8 AM and after approximately two and a half wrong turns and one (legal)
U-turn, rolled into the parking lot of the Harley hotel about 1:30 PM (12:30
St. Louis time), just in time, after registering, to miss the Internauts'
Luncheon. *B^( [Having taken a lot of flak as navigator to the Midwest
Amiga Expo (MAE) in Columbus, Ohio last year, I feel completely vindicated!]
*B^) Just as at the MAE, it was windy and _cold_ (there were even some snow
flurries!) so we hurried inside.
We learned at the registration desk that QuikPak had cancelled the day
before. My first reaction was that this was ominous, but later read in the
Dayton (Ohio) Area Amiga Gazette (Eric Schwartz, editor) that this was to be
expected if the buyout weren't complete by show time. The place was already
packed, especially the corridor outside the main exhibit hall, which held
the registration table as well as eight or ten exhibitors' tables that there
apparently wasn't room for inside. Here I chatted with the Schwartzes, Eric
and his dad Ron (may the Schwartz be with you); watched Lamar Morgan,
president of Amiga Atlanta, Inc. really hawk their Tenth Anniversary Banquet
video; checked out the really nice hardware at the Micro R&D booth; looked
longingly at the used hard drives and other great deals at the FASTRAX and
Dan's Deals booths; and bought some utilities at the booth on the end, which
my floor plan has labelled only as "Amiga Items."
I had missed the little side hall where Amiga Report/Legacy Magazine (a new
magazine-on-video Jason Compton is associated with) had their table. I got
there eventually and had a nice chat with Jason and with Pete Storonskij,
author of the bizarre and funny "Nuclear Golf" animation and the new game
Cephalotron (in game/2play on Aminet). Jason spoke of the big Computer 96
show he attended last year in Germany, saying it was HUGE but everyone there
complained about how small it had gotten, but I heard no such complaints
that day!
There were three or four tables covered with box after box of Amiga disk
magazines; there must have been several hundred of them! Bob and Diana
Scharp had some "I (heart) my Amiga" bumper stickers and some cool
color-changing rainbow check mark and smiley-face Amiga mugs at the Scharp
Designs table. I thought it showed real organization that the show chairman
had time to spend at his own booth!
About this time, my counterpart in GAC, newsletter editor William Maddock
caught up with me and immediately went into gracious host mode, giving me
the grand tour and introducing me to all these Famous Names of the Amiga
community. His enthusiasm and easy charm helped me get over that "Wow! I'm
meeting a celebrity!" awkwardness. (Thanks, Bill!)
We chatted with Don Hicks, managing editor of Amazing Computing magazine,
and Keith Siders, who was sharing Amazing's booth, showing his AmiFAST 3000
ZIP-to-SIMM adapter board. I noticed the Jesranis of Columbus's Compuquick
Media Center in the corner booth were doing the same land-office business
they had done at MAE. Next door was the poor HiSoft representative -- the
airline had somehow lost everything but his carry-on luggage, so he had
nothing to show, but there he sat, gamely representing his company as well
as he could under the circumstances. Next it was over to Canada's National
Amiga booth, where I made some dumb joke about "he talks just like 'The Kids
In The Hall!' " (no wonder they think us USAns are weird, eh?), and forgot
to write down the poor fellow's name. Ellen Kazmaier was at SoftLogik's
booth, offering really incredible prices on PageStream, TypeSmith and
several other items. She was a really persuasive salesperson, I'm sure they
moved a _lot_ of product out the door that day!
(Continued next post)
#: 291266 S3/Hot News and Rumor
19-Mar-97 06:17:36
Sb: #Amiga 97 Report
Fm: Pat Larkin 74246,1077
To: All
(Amiga 97 Report, Part 2 of 2)
Kermit Woodall at the Nova Design booth and the people at the Silent Paws
booth were surrounded by big crowds, so we moved on to the Intangible Assets
Manufacturing (I _love_ that name!) booth, where the (apologies to Dave
Letterman) "lovely and talented" Dale Larson was holding court. The GIF of
him on IAM's website doesn't do him justice. Dale did manage to see "Return
of the Jedi" that morning in a theater with a LucasFilm-approved sound
system, which we agreed makes a big difference. Continuing the theme of
great deals, Dale's book "Connect Your Amiga" was going for a great price,
and there were all those great metal Amiga logos lying there calling out
"Take me home & stick me on your computer!" I got a great shot of Dale
holding up the book for our newsletter and managed to score a couple of back
issues of The Amiga Informer as well.
NewTek had a very eye-catching professional-looking booth and always had big
crowds gathered around the Toaster Flyer setup as their talented and
somewhat flamboyant staff put it through its paces. Just to show that whimsy
still lives in the Amiga universe, the Flyer board has a row of eight or ten
LEDs which sit there and light up in sequence, back and forth, back and
forth. I immediately commented on the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica ("By
your command"), but those present under a certain age just looked puzzled
and cited Kit the talking car from Knight Rider.
In spite of the four and a half hours I spent at the show, I never did get
to take a close look at the Compuquick or Oregon Research booths, or talk to
the folks at the OZware or MoneySmart/Grafica Software tables -- every time
I started in that direction something else would come up and off I'd go in
another direction. I decided at the end of the day to make one last attempt,
but couldn't get through the crush of people gathering in the hall for the
door prize drawings. On the positive side, two of our group won items (Nova
Design's ImageFX and Aladdin4D demo video and a Fractal Pro image CD), and
then it was time to go.
Judging from the ticket numbers read off during the drawing, I'd guess over
fifteen hundred one-day and two-day tickets had been sold, with possibly a
few hundred more likely the next day, so I'd have to say the show was a
success. I certainly found it worth the eighteen hour day, the 500 mile
drive and the corny jokes the two cars told each other over the CB radio!
Many thanks to the Gateway Amiga Club for giving this little party and
inviting us all to it -- here's hoping for an even bigger and better one
next year!
Pat Larkin 74246.1077@compuserve.com
Amiga Society of Kentuckiana Louisville, Kentucky USA
Please feel free to repost and/or use in your newsletter (& send me a
copy?)
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Do you remember how you saved them? Just a stream of what came across your modem? Yes, that's the kind of message I'd add to this web.
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That particular chunk came from a .KPT file saved from Autopilot - a CIS navigator for Amiga, at least until CIS changed their forum structure and refused to share the format with the author.... That made CIS more or less useless for Amiga after that point.
The file is just a text file... loads fine into wordpad on the peecee.
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I've thought about writing some code to parse these text files to reconstruct the message threads or file archives from these forums, and making them available on a web site.
I did exactly what you describe here for about 350,000 messages posted to the FidoNet HolySmoke echo between 1993 and 2004.
http://www.tdavis.org/holysmoke/
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Ah, I miss reading the old Amiga Report stuff. For anyone who's interested, there's an entire archive of them here:
http://www.amigareport.com/
And then there's this:
http://www.cucug.org/amiga.html
How's that for some nostalgia for ya? ;)
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So what's under the hood of the FidoNet web? I planned to do it in PHP and MySQL.
I used to talk with Tom Jennings about ASCII art, teletypes, and the old Dead Media Project.
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So what's under the hood of the FidoNet web?
perl (HTML::Mason (https://metacpan.org/pod/HTML::Mason)) and Postgres. Search functionality is accomplished with swish-e (http://swish-e.org/). (The same arrangement is being used to drive memphisamigagroup.net (http://www.memphisamigagroup.net/) and puritytest.net (http://www.puritytest.net/) as well.) :)
The site is barely 500 lines of Mason, though. The bulk of the work was by far on the front end, establishing the parent/child relationships among the messages and populating the database. Only about 40% of the messages had the "REPLY:" pseudo-header that indicates the msgid of the parent message. The rest had to be figured out by comparing texts, e.g. comparing the first-level quotes in one message to the non-quoted parts of all other messages to find that one that most closely matches.
The look was lovingly styled after^W^W^Wbrazenly ripped off from Google Groups, back when it was still usable for searching Usenet.
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@ JimS
That was a nice read! Someone also recently posted a blurry screen shot of Ncomm connected to a BBS. Takes me back.
For a few years, I would swing by Compuquick in Gahanna, Ohio to buy some of their dwindling stock. Sadly, the last time I drove by, the whole shop was gone.
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@ JimS
That was a nice read!
For a few years, I would swing by Compuquick in Gahanna, Ohio to buy some of their dwindling stock. Sadly, the last time I drove by, the whole shop was gone.
Yeah, nostalgia can be fun ;-) I'll have to look into those files further, maybe collect them into a directory. Later on in that same .KPT file was the announcement of Gateway buying Commodore.
Since I've moved down to Southfield, I sometimes drive past what used to be the only computer store in the state. It's a Thai take out now. The old Amiga store i used to work in is now a home... like it used to be... looks much nicer too.