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 (sometime in the late 1990s to the best of my recollection). 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.
The following 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 with. 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 WHOIS.DOC. This can be dated exactly because there was a time command entered at the end which returned 15-SEP-1985 12:25:07. This is a list of users and profile information. This appears to have been publicly available info so I’m not DOXing anyone here. It’s mostly name, age, location, and interests type of stuff. This was probably a list of users from the Close Encounters Special Interest Group or possibly another SIG. Most of the users who list age are in their 30s or 40s which puts them in their 70s or 80s today…makes me feel old. It’s interesting looking at the computers people had and how many had or used several different ones. I guess this makes sense for users of early online services like Delphi. For many of them, I’m sure computers were a hobby.
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WHOIS.DOC
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Check out this post for the complete text in a format that resembles the original. I have not yet been able to accomplish similar formatting with Hive.
Check out some of my other recent posts:
Vintage Photos - Goodwill Lot 1 (369-372)
https://ecency.com/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-goodwill-lot-1-daeb7bc26cf86
BYTE: The Small Systems Journal (August 1986)
https://ecency.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/byte-the-small-systems-journal-b4e0214acdec8
Vintage Photos - Goodwill Lot 1 (365-368)
https://ecency.com/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-goodwill-lot-1-5de50236f0082
Brevard Renaissance Fair 2020: Music the Gathering - Misirlouckoo's Nest (13)
https://ecency.com/hive-181335/@darth-azrael/orerdqme
Vintage Photos - Goodwill Lot 1 (361-364)
https://ecency.com/photography/@darth-azrael/vintage-photos-goodwill-lot-1-e2f2949a2e42e
Maximum PC (January 2004)
https://ecency.com/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/maximum-pc-january-2004
Check out my other Social Media haunts (though most content is links to stuff I posted on Hive or reposts of stuff originally posted on Hive):
Wordpress: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/darth-azrael
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Darth_Azrael
Blogger: https://megalextoria.blogspot.com/
Odyssee: https://odysee.com/@Megalextoria:b
Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-2385054
Daily Motion: https://www.dailymotion.com/Megalextoria
Books I am reading or have recently read:
Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg
Tom Clancy's Op-Center: God of War by Jeff Rovin
Red Sails Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
