Re: HAPPY BIRTHDAY rec.food.cooking!

"blackdog" in news:1138541662.147030.284630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>
> Thanks for posting this message. Is Steve Upstill regular poster on this
> form?

No, he was never very frequent I think. More about Steve inside the June
2005 RFC origins story, which Victor Sack had encouraged (first links in my
previous message). This newsgroup began as one of various ad-hoc
initiatives in the 1980s among people interested in food who'd also been
using the Internet. (More on public access to Internet in the same origins
story, and in another response to follow.) Some of those people were around
Berkeley and had Atlas 150 pasta makers, hence the content of the first
message posted here 24 years ago (again, that's in the origins story). As
mentioned before, being part of the group with Atlas 150s, I was among
guinea pigs and test cooks for those three pasta recipes of Steve's. We
then followed the activity on the new newsgroup in initial years after Steve
launched it -- I still have lots of info on file posted here in the first
decade, when I was a more regular reader, though never much of a heavy
poster.* It is common for people to drift away over years. For instance,
for some years from mid 1980s, Brian Reid was a familiar name to everyone
following food on the Internet (e.g., creating the "Usenet Cookbook" then,
and "alt" newsgroups, which had a food motivation; arguing with me in 1987
that the wine newsgroup needed moderating) but by 1995 (as quoted in the New
York Times) he decided that the useful purpose of the newsgroups was, after
15 years, being supplanted by the then-new HTTP tools. When returning
periodically to familiar newsgoups after years, I've routinely seen (as
early as 1985) whole new sets of "regulars," different on each return.
(Sometimes they will arrive onto long-established newsgroups and post
literally for years, without learning much of the groups' considerable
history pre-them.) However, in unmoderated fora like these it is always the
contributors who make the group, for better and worse.

Steve's work on recipe-formatting software also is in the RFC origins story.

Cheers -- Max


*1983 garlic-press exchange for instance was only partly public. Steve had
argued passionately, when cooking once, that there was no need for handheld
garlic presses to exist. I (who sometimes used them and sometimes not)
disagreed. When responding to a posted query soon afterwards (link below),
I included something on dogma. The aim was true, for when I got an
enthusiastic email from Steve soon after, on a separate matter, it opened
with the side comment "Re Garlic presses: *** you, Max," proceeding then
cheerfully and respectfully to its main subject.

http://tinyurl.com/5zbd2

Note also that Google's archive has considerable holes in the "rec" groups.
It is especially unrepresentative of the seminal period from late 1980s to
early 1990s (which takes in the Renaming, origin of "alt" groups, etc.).
This is explained within Google's background info about the archive, but
still may not be obvious to a reader who casually searches that archive.
Other archives of early RFC material exist.




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