Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #10 – DM1001.DOC

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 DM1001.DOC which is dated October 1st, 1985. This file is on the longer side and features a mail reading session that includes mail from September 22nd 1985 through October 1st, 1985. There’s lots here including Close Encounters SIG related stuff, the love letters between Rod and Connie you’ve come to expect, and various other discussion.

One of the early e-mails is about Wang computers and a new SIG for those. Apparently Connie worked for an insurance company that used the Wang 2200 MVP which was a multi-user mini-computer that used a custom processor, custom version of BASIC and usually ran some kind of custom software for whatever company was using it. Things like insurance, inventory management, payroll and more.

There’s also quite a bit of discussion on ‘forms’ which seems to be how you set up menus and various user interactions on Delphi. Another interesting message discusses a crash Delphi recently had and ongoing problems they’ve been having with DEC hardware and software.

See the previous post here.

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DM1001.DOC
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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/2023/03/17/digital-archaeology-floppy-disk-10-dm1001-doc/