Re: XyWriters: XyWWWeb Needs Your Help! Please read...

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:

> Help!
>
> XyWWWeb has built a Google-like Search Engine, called
> _XySearch_, for the XyWrite mail lists.
>
> We wish to locate anyone who holds caches of old (especially
> really old) Email or BBS messages pertaining to XyWrite.
> Our own archives have the following big "holes", which need
> filling:

I'll check, Robert, but I doubt I even joined this list as recently as
1998.

> *Missing* Messages:
> ------------------
> XyQuest BBS:
>   all messages
> Technology Group [TTG] BBS:
>   all messages
> Word Processing BBS (SysOp: Henry Kisor):
>   all messages

You forgot the Relaynet echo, which comprised a sizable body of
messages. This is one area where I could possibly be of help, given
enough time . . . but there are some complications. Firstly, some of
this was on rather old media. I thought I had transferred all of my
old 5.25" diskettes to Zip disks (which were supposed to later go to
cd, though that process stalled awhile back), but found another good
size stack of them long after that drive was pulled from the system.
Secondly, my practice all along was to edit down the raw message logs
to only those messages I found to have possibly lasting reference
value (to me). They would have some xy-formatting inside -- Bold
highlighting, bold square root symbol, or one or more bold smiley
faces, and sometimes a bit of annotation, all of which I could search
on. My intent was always to organize this material into chronological
files, generally 12 to 36 files for each year, depending on the
volume, and dump them all into one capacious storage place, under some
structure where multi-year, mass-file searches would be possible,
either via Xy or ZTree. Inevitably, I never made it that far: all
along, there were always a substantial number of raw files that never
got processed. And this stuff is strewn all over hell and back, on
numerous & various removeable media. Finding it and assembling it
will be neither easy nor pretty.

It may be that Kinkos or some outfit like that still has a machine
that can read the old 5.25' diskettes.

> We strongly PREFER original, unaltered POP files, with
> attachments (if any). But we'd be very grateful for ANY
> kind of archive of these early periods: plain text, files
> in strange proprietary formats, whatever.

As stated above, much closer to the latter than the former.

Jordan