A summary for those that haven't been keeping up with this series:
I found a number of 5.25" disks at a thrift store a number of years ago (we are talking late 1990s probably). I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25" disk drive and extracting the contents a few years back. Since then I have been posting the contents here.
Based on the contents, most or all of these disks were apparently once owned by someone named Connie who used to run the “Close Encounters” Special Interest Group (SIG) on Delphi in the mid 1980s.
A description of this SIG was found in a document on one of the disks: "This SIG, known as 'Close Encounters', is a forum for the discussion of relationships that develop via computer services like the Source, CompuServe, and Delphi. Our primary emphasis is on the sexual aspects of those relationships."
This service was text based and was accessed via whatever terminal program you had available for your computer to dial in to Delphi’s servers. Many of these disks have forum messages, e-mails and chat session logs. All of this is pre-internet stuff and I am not aware of any archives in existence today that contain what was on Delphi in the 1980s.
This post includes the contents of DM0930.DOC which is dated September 30th, 1985. This file is shorter than most have been thus far and looks a little chaotic. I thought about combining it with the next file in the list but that one happens to be quite long already.
The first half of this file looks like a screen capture of a typical mail reading session similar to a number of previous posts but it looks like there are garbage characters in it…maybe there was noise on the line or something. The e-mail seems to be related to a Wang SIG with mention of the Wang 2200 MVP. The Wang 2200 line of computers were minicomputers used in business settings usually running programs written in BASIC.
The second half looks like the user is operating directly with the file system. I don’t know what the WS> prompt indicates but the disk name and file listing (with versioning) looks like VMS to me. That would makes sense as at the time, VMS seems like a likely candidate for being the backbone of online services like Delphi.
See the previous post here.
===
DM0930.DOC
===
===
Also posted here in its complete form with reasonably formatted text that is pretty close to the original formatting: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2023/01/03/digital-archaeology-floppy-disk-10-dm0930-doc/
I love these peeks into a simpler time of computing. Even when it is more sys admin stuff, it is interesting to get a look at how things were done back in the day.
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @darth-azrael ) sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.
Yay! 🤗
Your content has been boosted with Ecency Points, by @darth-azrael.
Use Ecency daily to boost your growth on platform!
Support Ecency
Vote for new Proposal
Delegate HP and earn more
I looked it up, and I have not found an exact year for the MVP model. Only that it was a multi-user upgrade. I found that the early Wang 2200 models were from 1973, and the MVP (Micro VP) model from the early 1980s. Either way, it looks like that it was a relatively new (probably a few years old) computer in 1985. If the data on the Wikipedia is correct. I have not heard about this computer so far.
This is an extremely interesting project. I love the idea of digital archaeology.