Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #10 – MRGCO.DOC

8 months ago

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 several years back. Since then I have been occasionally posting the content 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 a modem and 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 MRGCO.DOC. This appears to be a chat log in a conference labeled “Manager’s Conference”. The subject seems to be about recent reliability problems that Delphi was having at the time. Based on the discussion, it sounds like it was a problem with whatever DEC machines Delphi was run on having problems with frequent crashes for various reason. While the date on the file is clearly invalid, a date in the chat log itself indicates this is from September 28th 1985.

Based on the header and the menu at the end, it looks like this chat log was being sent by Connie to herself via MCI mail. I’m not sure why as previous similar logs on these disks look like they were captured directly. Maybe in this case it was originally captured by someone else…

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MRGCO.DOC
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