Twenty years

If you wait around long enough, anniversaries inevitably roll around. Here's one such day. Twenty years ago today rec.music.beatles saw its first post.

In 1987 there was no World Wide Web, not even an Internet. Most folks who had access to what was commonly called the 'Net understood it as Usenet, an outgrowth of a scientific/military communications system that included both electronic mail and a public bulletin board. Newsgroups were originally technical, later broadening to include a variety of hierarchies (talk*, soc*, sci*, news*) depending on what you needed to tell your compatriots.

Someone got the bright idea to include a rec* hierarchy for topics that couldn't otherwise be justified. Fun is an essential part of life, after all.

But the Net Gods at that time were disinclined to establish discrete groups for special interests, otherwise a plethora of newsgroups would crop up and overrun computer resources everywhere. Odd to think that anyone would be so concerned about CPU time and such in those days. But those were very different times.

rec.music.misc was the main music newsgroup. You could talk about anything---Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, the Stones, Brinsley Schwartz, Carl Perkins. The first "special interest" newsgroup was for Bob Dylan. But that was an exception. Why were others needed?

A fellow called Jim Kendall thought that perhaps the Beatles deserved their own newsgroup, and he waged a vociferous campaign for just such an eventuality. There was discussion, there was debate, even heated arguments. Votes were required to establish new groups, and a majority of voters agreed with Jim that a newsgroup devoted to the Beatles would be a good idea. But it was still a struggle to get node managers (in the days when Usenet was a series of points on a virtual map) to accept this reality.

Jim was persistent, most of the time politely so, and restistance gradually collapsed into acceptance. More and more sites accepted r.m.b. It propagated like a lusty weed. And Beatles fanatics are nothing if not lusty.

Google, for all its comprehensiveness, does not record the birth of r.m.b. Their archives come from a previous database called DejaNews, which focused on "major" newsgroups. r.m.b. was not always archived and as a result Google finds r.m.b. for the first time in late 1988. But there was a year or more of the newsgroup preceeding this.

Jim Kendall printed out every single post of r.m.b. for its first two years. For decades this archive has existed in boxes packed away in his personal collection of memorabilia, along with his butcher covers, alternate takes of Beatles tunes, posters, tickets, magazines. This year, Jim decided to share his archives with the rest of us.

Because my husband Bruce Dumes and I have been participants in the newsgroup since very nearly its inception, Jim decided to share the archives with us. Bruce was the master of the project. He used OCR (optical character recognition) software to capture the scanned archival images.

OCR can get 90-95% of what's on the printed page. Some things it has trouble with---"I" and "1" are frequently transposed. It can misundertand some spellings and insert random blank lines. ASCII art (Google is your friend, look it up) looks like hash in OCR. But it works most of the time. I've gone through the database and corrected what I've found on first pass. I'd be pleased to hear from others about corrections needed. Original spelling stands as it was.

What you'll get is about a month of rec.music.misc and discussion of what r.m.b. was necessary; then launch into r.m.b. proper from its incept date (3 Sept 1987) through 30 Nov 1987. What's curious is how many modern-day topics tuned up twenty years ago. Some things never age.

You'll find the first r.m.b. flame, the first discussion of the Paul Is Dead hoax, alternative mixes, CD masterings...topics that would not be out of place today. Flames are all on-topic, amusingly.

The site:

http://rmb.dumes.net

To navigate: we do it as we did then. Keystrokes only, no mousies. Screens in those days were green letters on black background. Don't like it? The alternate is white on black. Hit c ("Can't read green on back") and you'll be transported to black letters on a white ground.

Hit "return/enter" to navigate between posts. Use your spacebar to navigate topics. The email addresses you see will likely not work for anyone these days. They are artifacts of the past.

We had expected Jim to announce the first installment of the r.m.b. archives. I don't know what he would have said, probably something much more eloquent that what I've posted tonight. Alas, he passed away three weeks ago, so we will have to make do with my inadequate tribute.

For the record, Jim made it possible for me to learn what I've learned about the Beatles. Without r.m.b. I would not be who I am. I would not know what I know about these four lads from Liverpool. I would not have met the marvelous Beatle people who have spent time in this newsgroup and shared their own expertise and enthusiasm.

It's not a perfect environment. Neither is the world. We do the best we can. And the Fabs brought us here, so we might as well do what they expected of us: on-topic chat about the musicians who never leave our consciousness.

----
saki@xxxxxxxx
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Relevant Pages

  • RIP: Jim Kendall - founder, RMB
    ... Jim Kendall, ... Beatles fans around the world this week, ... A new newsgroup was created ... I asked what parameters need to be met for the vote to be ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
  • Re: Twenty years
    ... The first "special interest" newsgroup was for Bob Dylan. ... A fellow called Jim Kendall thought that perhaps the Beatles deserved ... Their archives come from a previous database called DejaNews, ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
  • Re: Twenty years
    ... The first "special interest" newsgroup was for Bob Dylan. ... A fellow called Jim Kendall thought that perhaps the Beatles deserved ... Their archives come from a previous database called DejaNews, ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
  • Re: Twenty years
    ... The first "special interest" newsgroup was for Bob Dylan. ... A fellow called Jim Kendall thought that perhaps the Beatles deserved ... Their archives come from a previous database called DejaNews, ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
  • Re: Twenty years
    ... The first "special interest" newsgroup was for Bob Dylan. ... days when Usenet was a series of points on a virtual map) to accept this ... And Beatles fanatics are nothing if not ... Their archives come from a previous database called DejaNews, ...
    (rec.music.beatles)
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