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Date:         Wed, 12 Apr 1995 17:29:04 -0400
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         drew@interport.net (Derek Drew)
Subject:      Newday article On Vanagon List

Ok folks. My wife wrote the article. She's deputy business editor for Newsday and she interviewed Gerry because she was so amused about my obsession with the list.

Now, this article is copyright Newsday/New York Newsday so...so..

...ah, what the heck, here is the text.=20

Derek 90 Syncro Camper

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Gerry loves his Volkswagen bus. He talks about it at parties, reads articles about it at night, and works on it in his driveway on the weekends. He talks about it at work, too -- with more than 300 other owners who love their VW busses in eight countries and 32 states. Gerry, a computer system administrator at a state university in the Midwest, operates what's known on the Internet as a "list server.'' In plain terms, he uses some of the extra disk space on the university's powerful Sun Microsystem computer network to run an interactive mailing list. More than 12,000 messages have been sent to the list in the past nine months. Each message, which is "posted'' by a list member via computer modem, goes into Gerry's central list program, gets copied 300-plus times and then gets distributed into the e-mailboxes of every other list member. Some of them then choose to respond to the "post,'' so they send their own messages to Gerry's computer and the process repeats. It's loads of fun, like being connected to a giant telephone party line. Somebody's paying for it. But it's not Gerry or any of his 300 e-mail correspondents. "When I think about the ethical issues, I know it's not 100 percent kosher,'' he says, referring to his use of state property for a hobby. "But it's just sort of leftover stuff. And the people [at universities] who connect to the Internet pay a fixed cost. It doesn't make a difference how many processors are running.'' There are hundreds of others "list server'' operators just like Gerry, who didn't want his full name nor the university's used in this article. They appropriate tiny chunks of unused disk space and what's called "bandwidth," which is like a radio frequency over which online information is sent, to maintain discussion groups on every imaginable topic. They are part of what gives the global maze of computers its charm and its sense of community. They are also a source of detailed information and first-hand experience that can be found nowhere else. "I was on a list for Mercedes owners and it became quickly a Mercedes diesel list," says Joel Walker, a list afficianado who works as a computer technician at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. "These guys needed more handholding because the [auto] dealers don't want to help them. They really have no choice but to help each other." The same is true for VW busses, Walker adds. "There's a [VW] Rabbit list, but it gets almost no traffic. I assume they get all their problems solved at the dealer,'' he says. One person who's not on the list, but wants to be, is Dennis Haynes, who fixes cars in Bohemia. Haynes specializes in VW bus repair and owns two Vanagons himself. Trouble is, Haynes doesn't own a computer. He says he has friends on the list, however, and recently was able to drum up some business after word circulated about a custom-made trailer hitch he designed for the VW Vanagon. He's already gotten one order from a list member, and has had several other inquiries. That kind of information -- newfangled trailer hitches or a cheap supply of propane vent covers or ingenious ways to fix an electrical hiccup caused by the bus' wiring harnass -- is the meat of the list. Members, many of whom are engineers or others technically inclined, are advised to incorporate hard information in their posts. Friday posts are an exception, though. List members have some fun that day posting poems, personal stories and jokes. And, if they can't control themselves midweek, they=FF20can submit nontechnical post to the= list so long as there's an (f), denoting "just for fun,'' after the subject line. Gerry started the VW bus list at Joel's behest last April. The two had met online after Gerry's month-old VW Vanagon developed a problem the dealer couldn't solve. He described his problem in a post to another Internet form of discussion forum, called a newsgroup, entitled: rec.autos.vw. Joel responded, and the two became friends. Joel wanted to start a mailing list among other bus owners he had met= through rec.autos.vw, but he didn't have direct access to his university's mainframe computer. "There's a guy here who runs a homemade beer list on state government time and is part-owner of a homemade beer supply store downtown," Joel says, gruffly. "Now some might call that a conflict of interest using state funds, but nobody cares. He can do it because he's in system administration." Gerry, though, asked his boss, an associate dean, if it would be okay to run the VW bus list on his university system and got the okay. "He knew very little about computers or anything I was doing," Gerry says. Later on, Gerry did get a boss who was more closely associated with the computer department, and he got his okay, too. "I try not to hide it," he= says. Gerry tries also not to let administration work for the VW list get in the way of his job. "I try not to read list mail during work," Gerry says. "But on my break I'll get some coffee and spend the next 30 minutes reading Vanagon mail." Gerry says he spends only about 30 minutes a day on list administration, dealing with such things as undeliverable e-mail and new subscribers. "I only have to do things if the mail goes wrong," he says. One day last fall, the mail went very wrong. List members had started a "posting sweepstakes," to see which member could rack up the largest number of messages sent. Traffic on the list soared. The overload succeeded in crashing the university's computer. "I had to shut the list down," Gerry says, sheepishly. After he fixed the problem, he re- started the list with a plea to members to stop their games. The little disaster had a bright side, too. "That forced me to figure out how the 'sendmail' program works," Gerry says. He reconfigured the university system to run more efficiently and, with that knowledge, was also able to start managing complicated communications projects for professors. For example, he conducted a survey of more than 2,000 biologists, and was able to invent a database to post the survey and collect the results. "It would have been very expensive to hire out for someone to do that," Gerry notes. "I just used the van list as a guinea pig." The list has another benefit, too. Says Gerry, "If I wasn't running the list, I might get really bored with my job." Derek Drew drew@interport.net (preferred) DerekDrew@aol.com (if interport is down)


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