Re: Twenty years
- From: "RichL" <rpleavitt@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 03:31:21 GMT
"saki" <saki@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5k411iF21enmU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.
Thank you for a great post, and the link to a wonderful archive!
I can't think of a better legacy for Jim to have left for us.
Great stuff!
.
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