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
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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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