Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #14

A summary for those that haven't necessarily 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 COMPUTER.DOC. This file is dated September 2nd, 1985 and is in a subdirectory called TELEPSYC. This is an article on types of computer addiction ("ego syntonic" and "ego dystonic"). No name or other credit is listed in the file. I tried doing a web search on a few strings from this article but couldn't find anything so I'm not sure who wrote it. Based on the name of the subdirectory and the mention near the end of the file itself, I believe this article came from a special interest group or some other kind of feature on Delphi called "TelePsych".

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COMPUTER.DOC
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