Organization: AT&T Labs Research Subject: Re: consim-l history (from: The old argument..) John Best asks about the history of the Consim-L mailing list: > I was struck by David's mentioning of five or six years, and it led to > me to wonder if anybody knows the history of consim-l? Facts such as > who started it, and when, and whether the enrollment has grown > dramatically, or at all, would be appreciated. I don't know about who started it or when, but I do know that enrollment and participation has shot way up since the day I first subscribed. That was sometime around 1993 I think, just shortly after Shipbase III was released. At the time, Consim-L averaged about 20 or 30 messages a day. It's been averaging over 100 messages a day, on and off, for the past few years. Back in 1993, the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.board also had about 30 new messages a day on average. The miniatures equivalent, rec.games.miniatures, hadn't yet split into .historical, .warhammer, and .misc newsgroups, so everything from WRG7 to Warhammer was being discussed in the same place. That averaged around 30 to 40 messages a day, too. Of course, we didn't have computers back then, we had to compute things by banging sticks and rocks together in a binary fashion. [Cue rambling old codger mode] We all had sixteen fingers, too, so we knew how to count in hexidecimal, not like you youngsters today. Why, if you were lucky enough to have a hard drive, it was only 1 meg, and it was the size of a cattle truck. Why, I remember... DLF _____________________________________________________________________ David Ferris Senior Technical Staff Member dferris@research.att.com AT&T Labs Research Room B015, 973-360-8664 http://www.research.att.com/info/dferris Subject: Re: consim-l history From: Scott Wilde As someone who has lurked on this list for a long, LONG time, I can provide the following tidbit dredged up from the depths of my mail folders. [As you can see from the initial paragraph, boardgaming has been on its deathbed for quite some time now.] Scott wilde@meitca.com ------- Forwarded Message Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2MX) with BSMTP id 4396; Sun, 20 Jan 91 22:21:12 EST Received: from UGA.BITNET by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4011; Sun, 20 Jan 91 22:21:11 EST Date: Sat, 19 Jan 91 21:16:57 MST Reply-To: Conflict simulation Games Sender: Conflict simulation Games From: Don Pirot Subject: Welcome and thanks for joining To: Multiple recipients of list CONSIM-L The subscriber total for this list has just reached 75, not bad since it was formed just four days ago. I hope that it proves to be a useful forum and generates some new life into a hobby that quite a few people have predicted was dying. I'm the owner of the list and I'll carry on the thread that was started a couple of days ago by telling you a bit about myself. I've been in the hobby for about 20 years. My first game was Avalon Hill's old Stalingrad, and I came into S & T on issue 32 (Borodino). I prefer operational level and campaign games and my favourite historical periods are the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War, though one of my favourite games is Victory Games Vietnam. I used to play a lot more than I do now (isn't everyone saying that these days :-) ). Most of my games over the past several years have been played by mail, the last two being played by e-mail. I've been a member of AHIKS (the Avalon Hill International Kriegspiel Society) for about 17 years - more about that in a later posting. I'm a modest game collector - I have about 510 games. A couple of years ago I volunteered to act as a coordinator and contact point for AHIKS members on Bitnet and Internet. The idea was to promote play by e-mail gaming. The idea has gotten off to a fairly slow start, but there are definite possibilities. I have source code for a die roll generator written in both C and Pascal and several of us have been using it to generate die rolls for e-mail games. It requires an independent third party to supply seeds on request but it works fairly well. I plan to post it on this list shortly. This is probably enough for a single posting. I have a few more things to say but I'll save them for later. Once again, welcome to the list. Let's hear from all of you. Don Pirot, | BITNET: DPIROT@UALTAVM University Computing Systems, | Internet: dpirot@sol.ucs.ualberta.ca University of Alberta, | Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. | ------- End of Forwarded Message From: dpirot01@connect.ab.ca Subject: Re: consim-l history (from: The old argument..) Actually, I started the list about eight years ago when I was still at the University of Alberta. After I left the university, Hjalmar Gerber took it over and eventually it migrated to Copenhagen, where it is no. It was originally intended for discussion of all aspects of wargaming, with the emphasis on discussion of board wargemes, particularly SPA, TAHGC, etc, but was also open to miniatures and general military history discussion. Don Pirot At 11:12 AM 9/4/98 -0400, you wrote: >John Best asks about the history of the Consim-L mailing list: > >> I was struck by David's mentioning of five or six years, and it led to >> me to wonder if anybody knows the history of consim-l? Facts such as >> who started it, and when, and whether the enrollment has grown >> dramatically, or at all, would be appreciated. > >I don't know about who started it or when, but I do know that enrollment >and participation has shot way up since the day I first subscribed. That >was sometime around 1993 I think, just shortly after Shipbase III was >released. At the time, Consim-L averaged about 20 or 30 messages a day. >It's been averaging over 100 messages a day, on and off, for the past >few years. > >Back in 1993, the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.board also had about 30 new >messages a day on average. The miniatures equivalent, >rec.games.miniatures, hadn't yet split into .historical, .warhammer, and >.misc newsgroups, so everything from WRG7 to Warhammer was being >discussed in the same place. That averaged around 30 to 40 messages a >day, too. > >Of course, we didn't have computers back then, we had to compute things >by banging sticks and rocks together in a binary fashion. [Cue rambling >old codger mode] We all had sixteen fingers, too, so we knew how to >count in hexidecimal, not like you youngsters today. Why, if you were >lucky enough to have a hard drive, it was only 1 meg, and it was the >size of a cattle truck. Why, I remember... > >DLF > >_____________________________________________________________________ >David Ferris Senior Technical Staff Member >dferris@research.att.com AT&T Labs Research >Room B015, 973-360-8664 http://www.research.att.com/info/dferris From: Hjalmar.Gerber@UAlberta.CA (Hjalmar Gerber) Subject: Re: consim-l history Scott Wilde: >As someone who has lurked on this list for a long, LONG time, I can provide >the following tidbit dredged up from the depths of my mail folders. >[As you can see from the initial paragraph, boardgaming has been on its >deathbed for quite some time now.] Thanks, Scott. CONSIM-L was, indeed, started at the beginning of 1991. The original inspiration came from Don Pirot - who has just resubbed after being on a six-month expedition through Southeast Asia. I, yours truly, decided on the name, and together we sought the technical help of a non-wargamer, Chris Thierman, who implemented the LISTSERV list for us at the University of Alberta. When the UofA dropped LISTSERV as the software standard, the list was moved to The Universtity of Copenhagen where it was in the capable hands of Erik Lawaetz. He steered it into the calm waters of ezmlm, and also recruited his friend Alan Poulter to take over the main burden of list-ownership. I remain as a listowner, although Alan is usually a few steps ahead of me. Thanks for reading. Hjalmar Gerber _____________ From: Alan Poulter Subject: Re: consim-l history At 10:39 04/09/98 -0600, Hjalmar Gerber wrote: >Scott Wilde: >>As someone who has lurked on this list for a long, LONG time, I can provide >>the following tidbit dredged up from the depths of my mail folders. >>[As you can see from the initial paragraph, boardgaming has been on its >>deathbed for quite some time now.] > > Thanks, Scott. CONSIM-L was, indeed, started at the beginning of 1991. > The original inspiration came from Don Pirot - who has just resubbed > after being on a six-month expedition through Southeast Asia. I, yours > truly, decided on the name, and together we sought the technical help of > a non-wargamer, Chris Thierman, who implemented the LISTSERV list > for us at the University of Alberta. When the UofA dropped LISTSERV > as the software standard, the list was moved to The Universtity of > Copenhagen where it was in the capable hands of Erik Lawaetz. He > steered it into the calm waters of ezmlm, and also recruited his friend > Alan Poulter to take over the main burden of list-ownership. I remain > as a listowner, although Alan is usually a few steps ahead of me. Just to add my bit to this story, I found Consim-L on a print out of BITNET mailiing lists. I would guess this was late 91/early 92. I first met Erik in Copenhagen in October 94. I was enjoying Consim-L membership, and using Erik's email die roller a lot so I treated Erik to a meal and a night out on the town :) I was in Copenhagen teaching a special EU-funded course and it ran again in 95, 96 and 97. Instead of drinking, in later years we played Yom Kippur, Samurai and Scratch One Flattop respectively. Reports of these encounters ought to be on Web-Grog under the games. Unfortunately I have changed jobs so no Copenhagen jaunt for me this year :-( I started Web-Grog in April 95. I do not remember when I took over as a Consim-L list admin but I was a list admin during the Great Moderation Debate of September 96. That prompted the Charter change procedure, which has never been used, thankfully. The move to ezmlm brought changes for list admins. With listserv, you saw list members subbing and unsubbing. This gave a rough idea of how the list membership was going. With ezmlm you do not see this. The pain of listserv was that all the error messages from invalid or inaccessible email accounts got bounced to the list admins. Thus if the list had 100 posts a day and there were X bouncing email address, you got 100 + (X x 100) emails :-( Ezmlm, bless it, takes care of all these bounces! For an archive of Consim-L postings, and other stuff, please see:- http://grognard.com/email.html Alan Poulter Web-Grognards