Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #10

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 (we are talking late 1990s probably). I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25" disk drive and extracting the contents a few years back. Since then I have been posting the contents 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.

A 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 to Delphi’s servers. 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 MEMBERS.DOC which is dated September 24th, 1985. This appears to be a member list of the Close Encounters SIG. It includes username, name as well as some other info. The binary looking number indicates permissions though I don’t know what permission each bit represents. Despite there being separate user names and names, it’s pretty clear that the ‘name’ isn’t necessarily a real name. Some look like they could be real names but others are only first names or are clearly aliases. As of the above date there were 167 members.

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MEMBERS.DOC
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