[mythtv-users] posting protocol - bottom vs. top???

TimP mythtv at corky.co
Sat Feb 16 23:02:04 UTC 2019


On 2019-02-16 22:46, Allen Edwards wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 12:58 PM Simon Hobson <linux at thehobsons.co.uk> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Allen Edwards <allen.p.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> This is the only place I have ever seen bottom posting. It is a pain 
>>> but clearly much worse to do mixed posting.
>> 
>> Short history lesson - "somewhat simplified". Once upon a time, the 
>> internet was small and mostly occupied by academics - and as it grew, 
>> it still retained that element of a community. Certain things were 
>> taken for granted - trimmed quotes, bottom posting and use of plain 
>> text - and programs worked with those.
>> ...
> 
> I guess I don't go back that far.  I did save some correspondence that 
> was important to me from 1994 and it is top posted. I looked for some 
> old Usenet posts but they are kind of hard to find.  At one time I 
> could just search on my name and my old usenet posts would come up. Not 
> anymore.  All I get is some hair stylist.

Here's one of the oldest emails I have, rather proud of it:

On 2006-09-25 20:31, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Tim Phipps wrote:
>> 
>> 	Just read you article about why GPL2 is so good and noticed you
>> reliving the pain of an expensive Minix license. I would like to offer
>> to ease that pain by buying it off you if you still have it. Money is 
>> a
>> bit short so I can't offer more than $10 for it. Please don't E-bay it
>> as it would probably rocket up out of my reach.
> 
> Heh.
> 
> I don't even know what happened to my set of disks with Minix on them. 
> I
> may even have it somewhere in a box (but that's unlikely - I've moved 
> so
> many times since them), but hey, if I still have them, I'd probably 
> still
> not sell them to you.
> 
> And the $169 (plus postage and handling - I think it came to more than 
> a
> thousand fin-marks) doesn't really sting _any_more_ as much as it did 
> back
> then. I'm not a poor university student any more, and while I look back 
> on
> those days with fondness, I have to say that I'm just as happy those 
> days
> are over ;)
> 
> [ Side note: I'm not really sure that the $169 was even accurate. I was
>   thinking about it yesterday after I wrote it, and wondering why I'd
>   remember a number like that, especially since I _paid_ for it in FIM. 
> So
>   while I think it's in the right price-range, I wonder if it might not 
> be
>   that this is a planted memory.
> 
>   I was thinking that 169 is the 6502 machine code for "LDA", which is
>   where I might have gotten it from. Which is _really_ scary, since I
>   haven't programmed in 6502 machine code in more than twenty years. ]
> 
> But if I find the box (actually, I think it was a big white binder), 
> I'll
> think of you,
> 
> 		Linus



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