David Burgess wrote: >Aren't we quite near to the fifth anniversary of this list? I remember that >I joined around July '98, and the list was 2-3 months old at the time. I >also remember being one of the first 50 to join, and the announcement that >the list had reached the 50 mark. >How many here are still hanging on from those early days? Ahh yes, nostalgia, that sweet light of yesteryear, that rosy glow. :) I remember that I started out in April of 1998 by sending a weekly compendium of tips for using Calmira from my Juno account (thus the name "Calmira Tips"). The first couple mailings were just tips from me, but it wasn't long before the growing membership started contributing posts. Being that it was just a regular email account, I would have to take members' posts that arrived in the mailbox and copy/paste them into the digest using what seemed to be an unwieldy method of copying/pasting involving Notepad. As the membership grew, this got to be rather a clumsy method! I don't remember exactly what this process was, but I seem to remember that this process actually involved using a Calmira feature, so the little list about Calmira was being made WITH the help of Calmira. :) I started out with about 5 members, of which I have no idea where I got them. Li-Hsin Huang (Calmira's creator) was the sixth or seventh member to join. The inaugural issue was to go out on Sunday the 12th of April 1998, but it was a day late because I was so busy at work I forgot about it. It wasn't long before I had to step up the frequency of the mailings from weekly to tri-weekly, then to daily. And, as the membership edged over 50, I faced another challenge: Juno's limitation preventing me from sending to over 50 recipients at a time. I had to start sending in two batches, 50 at a time. As you can imagine, as I was using my Juno client's regular addressbook, segregating the members into groups of 50 was quite the challenge (anybody else here ever used Juno v1.49?). As my addressbook grew, it would take longer and longer to load on my rather straining 386, until it took almost 5 minutes to do the simplest thing, like adding yet another address. In the early summer of '98, I started to consider using an actual mailing list host, but I kept dragging my feet on it until something happened to motivate me. A fellow from Austria tried to join, and his ISP was rejecting all email from Juno, thinking that Juno was a spam domain. Infuriated, I blasted his ISP (who never even remotely responded to me). Within two days, I had signed on with a small outfit in San Francisco called "Makelist". With the fellow from Austria finally on board, I started to rather enjoy the fruits of a REAL, fully automated list that didn't take an hour a day to compile and send. It was to be a short-lived joy however, as Makelist was a TERRIBLE host. They would take over a day to distribute postings, even lose some, and their downtime would be very nearly double-digit percentages. Because at the time I was being primed to take over ownership of another list called Juno_accmail which was hosted on world.std.com at the time, I had a world account of my own. So, after an email to the Majordomo manager at the world to set things up, I made my first of a number of moves, getting everybody migrated over to the new host. In late summer / early fall of '98, I took full ownership of the Juno_accmail list, making two lists I had hosted on world.std.com. The world was a pay service, and I was paying almost us$30 a month to host two lists. And, the world had an interesting policy where I would be charged an extra us$5 in any month where my total membership between BOTH lists exceeded some certain number. As you can imagine, this wasn't the best of situations. So, sometime in the fall of '98, I migrated (again) to an outfit called Onelist. This time, I was moving TWO lists, over 600 members altogether, and I still remember what a pain that was. Ever hear of the expression "herding cats"? LOL... Groan... Onelist served me well for a good bit of time. In early '99, Onelist and eGroups (who I later found out to formerly be Makelist) merged. And, in late '99, it was announced that eGroups was being bought out by Yahoo. This was shortly after Yahoo had bought out Geocities, and raised a scandal with the "we own all your content" terms, so I was rather infuriated and alarmed at the idea of having MY lists, MY precious lists on Yahoo.. It was also in late '99 that I founded Calmira.org. Kind of a funny story actually. When I announced my intention to the list to start the domain, Li-Hsin was astonished, and thought I was telepathic or such. Turned out that he had just (secretly) been on holiday to the US to interview for Microsoft. AND, Microsoft offered him a job working on Internet Explorer v5. So, when I broke the news about calmira.org, he was just about to break HIS news. Due to the possibility of a legal conflict of interest, Li-Hsin had to retire from Calmira altogether, so my starting calmira.org was a bit of most incredibly good timing.. In a couple short months, Calmira had become a self-hosted and community-developed bit of software. What a time that was! It took a goodly bit of looking, but sometime in the first half of 2000 or so, I found this fledgling service called Freelists. It seemed excellent, because I liked the ideals it was run on, I liked the fact that it was running on entirely Free/GPL software (by this time I'd been into Linux for over a year), and I rather liked it's ad-free nature. So, with almost no hesitation I moved (AGAIN) to Freelists. This time, it was THREE lists I was moving, as by then I had founded FreeNET.. Augh! List moves! It's been almost 1.5 years since I moved to Freelists, and I have no regrets. It's run by a competant and intelligent fellow who I by now personally know and like, and unlike some of the previous corporate listhosts I had before, I can reach the Freelists owner on ICQ. :) In answer to your question, a quick scan of the member list shows 5 names that I recognize as early-timers. Mind you, that's a very subjective figure, as it's a very casual scan, and human memory being what it is, for what that's worth.. Much to my surprise and delight, the Austrian fellow who was the catalyst to the list's maturation into an automated list is still here! (I'll certainly never forget HIS name or email.. <g>) Right now, we're sitting at 171 members. A bit down from more peak times, but still a respectable number nonetheless. So the list is almost 5 years old... Wow. Almost boggles the mind, doesn't it, that anything at all on the Net could or typically would last that long? Well happy birthday C_T! ********************************************* Happy computing with Calmira! www.calmira.org Robin Roe, owner/admin/webmaster, etc Visit YOUR Calmira site at www.calmira.org ********************************************* -- To unsubscribe, send a message to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe calmira_tips" in the body. OR visit //freelists.org