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"R.A.D. Oldtimers"
Written by Debbie Pickett (debbiep@molly.cs.monash.edu.au)
Copyright: 1996. Originally posted 11/20/96.
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Maiesha_Rodriguez@brown.edu (Maiesha Rodriguez) writes:
>Okay, this doesn't have much to do with disney animation but how this
>newsgroup has progessed. Even since I started participating this past
>summer are people here at r.a.d. becoming a little more belligerent? Were
>the good ol' days really the good ol' days?

[Scene: A tropical beach.  Soft music is playing, heavily featuring
 Hawaiian steel guitars.]

r.a.d oldtimer 1: Who'd 'ave thought then that now we'd all be sittin' 'ere
  in this newsgroup?
r.a.d oldtimer 2: Aye, and t' think that only three years ago we were
  all crowded into one newsgroup, all thirty of us, with no newsgroup
  hierarchy to put between us.
r.a.d oldtimer 3: Hierarchy?  You were lucky to 'ave a hierarchy!  We
  used to have to post using raw NNTP onto a tiny little news server
  that'd accept our articles *if* we were lucky, and then we'd 'ave to
  wait six weeks for a followup, and that was just if they was in the
  same *continent*.
r.a.d.oldtimer 4: Well, we 'ad it tough in those days.  When *I* were a
  lad, we never 'ad any Disney newsgroup.  We 'ad to all post our
  articles, all ninety-four of us, to rec.arts, and if there were
  anything in there that wasn't Disney, well, we just 'ad to grin and
  bear it.
oldtimer 1: I remember when there wasn't even rec.arts, and we all 'ad
  to post to the rec newsgroup, all three 'undred of us, and sift
  through the articles and ignore all the ones about scuba because we
  were too poor to afford a proper killfile.
oldtimer 2: Well, when I say newsgroup, it was a newsgroup to us, but it
  were really just a mailing list.  But we all pretended it were a
  newsgroup because it felt like one t' us.
oldtimer 3: You were lucky to 'ave a mailing list!  Why, when I were
  young, we never had anything like email.  We just crowded into the
  corner o' one room and wrote messages on bits o' paper and handed them
  out to the others.  But in our hearts we knew that when we could
  afford email we'd upgrade to it.
oldtimer 4: Right.  We used t' 'ave t' write our articles, tape them to
  the leg o' a carrier pigeon,  and 'ope that the buggers would get t'
  the other end before they dropped from exhaustion.  And if we wanted
  a response we'd 'ave t' wait another six months for the bird to come
  back, which it would if we were *lucky*.  And then we'd find out that
  there'd been a transmission error and they'd answered the wrong
  person's email.
oldtimer 1: And you tell the new readers that today and they won't
  believe you.
others: Aye, no they won't.