Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #10 – AOLDBAS.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. I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25" disk drive and extracting the contents a while 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 AOLDBAS.DOC which is dated September 13th, 1985. It looks like news or “what’s new” information that might be displayed to a user when they entered the SIG.
See the previous post here.
In the past a screen shot was the best I could do but I finally found a way to post the text here and keep pretty much the same formatting as the original document. On my own site, the PRE tag works great. Here I've tried PRE, BLOCKQUOTE, and CODE. PRE put lots of extra space in for some reason and BLOCKQUOTE wasn't any better. CODE did the best but stripped out certain characters. However, by manually escaping things like "<" and ">" it works pretty well. Line spacing still looks a little off in parts but it's close anyway.
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AOLDBAS.DOC
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27-AUG BRIEF USER CONTRIBUTIONS Do you have a favorite poem or fantasy? Perhaps a news item you would If so, perhaps you might consider submitting them for addition to the 23-AUG BRIEF ON CLOSE ENCOUNTERS There is a new article in the General Database titled: On Close 12-AUG BRIEF "MS." MAGAZINE REPRINT Now available in the Noteworthy News database is a reprint with 12-AUG BRIEF ART GALLERY The Art Gallery database has a new submission by RODM which contains 11-AUG BRIEF POETRY & ART There are two new sections now available - Poetry and Art Gallery. === Also posted here: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2022/01/18/digital-archaeology-floppy-disk-10-aoldbas-doc/
like to share? Have you tried using ASCII text to create pictures
either suggestive, explicit, or just plain fun?
databases here. The process is simple and there is help available at
the ENCOUNTER> prompt. Simple select help from the menu. There is
help for ASCII and XMODEM file transfers there.
Encounters and Compu-Sex.
permission of the publisher of the article "Modems: Close Encounters
of the Computer Kind" by Lindsy Van Gelder from the September 1983
issue of "MS" magazine.
some various and interesting ways to say 'I love you'. Thank you,
Rod!
Please submit your creative masterpieces <and non-masterpieces as
well><grin> at your convenience!
Looks like I spoke too soon about the formatting. It looks MOSTLY ok on ecency and peakd but is mostly invisible on hive.blog...
https://twitter.com/Darth_Azrael/status/1484210331543027713
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