info-cpm newgroup archive (beta)
This is an initial experimental service, but I hope it will be useful, or at
least an interesting piece of history.
A bit of history
The INFO-CPM newgroup was formed on 29th August 1979 as a spin-off from
INFO-MICRO, then both hosted at MIT-MC. INFO-CPM remained there until 1983,
when it moved to BRL. INFO-CPM was then gatewayed into the USENET community,
initially as fa.info-cpm, the fa prefix then indicating "from the ARPANET".
By 1986 INFO-CPM had become a full newgroup, now named net.micro.cpm and was
accessible over a wider area of the internet, through CSNET, BITNET and
others.
Sometime in the early 1990s, comp.os.cpm formed. Posts to comp.os.cpm can
be found on
Google. Google's archive appears to go back to about 1992, but it's
browsable indexes only go back a couple of years or so. If you know what
you're looking for you can search within comp.os.cpm, but you can't browse.
Source
The messages that make up this archive are sourced from the SIMTEL archives
on the Walnut Creek CD-ROM, available in various places on the Internet, including
The RetroArchive at
http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/cdrom/SIMTEL/ARCHIVES/CPM/
Cantrell
mirrors at
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/mirrors/index.pl?path=/cpm/walnut-creek-CDROM/SIMTEL/ARCHIVES/CPM/
Processing
The only processing of the messages has beein to put the date and headers
into a consistant format and to extract individual messages from digests.
The full raw messages can be found in the SIMTEL archives.
Mirrors
I'd be happy for anybody to mirror the archives. You'll need about 25M of
disk space. You can either suck the entire contents from my website, or
contact me and I'll send you the whole site zipped up.
Linking
I am happy for anybody to link to these archives. You don't need to ask,
just link. That's the nature of the internet.
Copyright
The ususal position with newsgroup postings is that copyright in the
original content of a posting remains with the author of that posting. By
posting to a newsgroup the copyright owner (author) is giving permission for
that posting to be made publically available. Those distributing those
postings must ensure that they are attributed to the copyright owner
(author), in this case be ensuring that the messages have appropriate
"From:" header lines.
Milestones
See also this posting.
Missing messages
Some messages are missing from this archive, from info-cpm's formation in
August 1979 to the first SIMTEL archive message in September 1980. If
anybody ever finds these, it would be winderful to include them.
Other bits
Index design and layout insprired by Google.