[sf-lug] Jim Stockford (and/or others?): Do you have old list emails?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> Anyway, I'm mostly interested in getting "missing" (or better/
> preferred) BALUG list emails suitable for archive.  

That would be cool, and, if such can be found, if you can use help
wrangling it into mbox format (as would probably be necessary, based on
my experience collecting people's saved copies of missing mailing list
traffic), I can probably help -- but I doubt you need it.

> And, sort'a a
> "while we're at it", not much incremental work for me (and I'm guestimating
> also Jim), to effective grab/check SF-LUG at same time - see if
> anything at all shows up there as "missing" that ought be in archive
> (and from the more recent list postings, sounds like it's rather
> improbable to find any "missing" bits - so perhaps not worth
> bothering to check for SF-LUG ... notwithstanding the stuff *prior*
> to linuxmafia.com hosting the SF-LUG list(s) - that may still be well
> worth it).

Yes, to repeat, if anyone has saved mail from the origianl incarnation
of SF-LUG's mailing list, that suffered some disaster I've never heard
the full story about, please let me know (offlist), and I'll see what I
can do.

> Also as for Linux history, and history thereof in the Bay Area, I think
> SF-LUG is among those that go back the furthest in history ... not sure the
> precise ordering, but I think "oldest" among LUGs in the bay area, in
> approximate order, would be
> SVLUG
> BALUG
> BAD
> SF-LUG
> ... but I might not have the order quite right, and I'm not fully sure
> which are the 4 or 5 LUGs that had the earliest start in the Bay Area
> (or same for such that still exist).

CABAL dates back to 1997
(http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/installfest/#cabal).  BAD was founded some
time in the latter half of 1998.  (The first mailing list post was in
November 1998.  There are two in the archive that purport to have
earlier date stamps, but those were clock errors.)

When I say CABAL dates back to 1997, I mean that the group that
eventually (some time in 1997-1998) gained the name 'CABAL' was founded
for tactical reasons described at the above link, and at first didn't
have a specific name, just a regular meeting place and regular meeting
time, 744 Harrison Street, 2nd & 4th Saturdays, 4pm -- taking over that
location and time from SFpcUG's Linux SIG when that group suddenly
stopped paying rent for space at 744 Harrison, the CoffeeNet building.

As I describe at the link, this initially unnamed group was deemed to be
for convenience under the umbrella of BALUG, in the sense that BALUG
webmistress Cyndy Fire Eisner listed out meetings and installfest as
part of BALUG's schedule, but one day she said she wasn't sure she had
the authority to list one of our installfests because BALUG president
Art Tyde was out of the country, so we thought fast and asked if she
could justify listing our event if it had a non-BALUG identity and she
said yes, so we invented the name Consortium of All Bay Area Linux
(CABAL), as a semi-joke because we'd been doing installfests all over
the Bay Area.

SVLUG is definitely first, but it had the unbeatable advantage of
predating Linux, having been founded as the PC-UNIX SIG of the Silicon
Valley Computer Society.  The name 'Silicon Valley Linux User Group'
originated _not_ as the name of the group but rather as the name of its
first mailing list, the one Rob Walker created in 1997 that ran on
majordomo.  Later, SVCS's PC-UNIX SIG was renamed 'Silicon Valley Linux
User Group' to match the name of the mailing list.

Oddly enough, a very similar thing happened with BALUG.  Originally, Art
Tyde was referring to the group as 'San Francisco Bay Area Linux Group',
but then Dave Sifry created a mailing list called 'balug', and then the
group's name settled on that of the mailing list.

There were several other Bay Area LUGs older than SF-LUG that you didn't
mention, such as EBLUG, CalLUG, and there were a number of others.