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, at least some 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 used on 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 don’t know if there are any archives in existence today of what was on Delphi in the 1980s. In any case, much of this stuff would have been private at the time and probably wouldn’t be in such archives even if they existed.
This post includes the contents of XFLAG.DOC. This file is dated September 24th, 1985. This is a relatively short one. It lists the subset of users (probably of the Close Encounters SIG) that have the ‘X’ flag on their profile. I’m not sure exactly what this indicates other than it represented a certain set of permissions. I don’t recognize any of these user names from any of the chats or messages that have shown up so I suppose it is even possible it indicates a ban or something.
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XFLAG.DOC
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fl Search through membership list for flags Enter Flag you would like to search: x Username: BAS Flags: X Name: basil Username: FRANKH Flags: X Name: Frank Howard Username: HARPO Flags: X Name: TIM CRAIG Username: JOHNEASTON Flags: X Name: Karl Username: KBS Flags: X Name: JERRY Username: MERONA Flags: X Name: JAY Username: RONB Flags: X Name: Ron Username: SASSY Flags: X Name: SYL Username: TRICON Flags: X Name: Bob End of File. SM*MEMBERS> [)F= _$y @$q6 DISCONNECT *# ?
