comp.sys.ti

[+9640News]

Hey,

 

Hoping someone out there can help me. Google Groups has all the messages from comp.sys.ti online at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.sys.ti.

 

One can go to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.sys.ti/after$3A1986$2F06$2F10$20AND$20before$3A1986$2F12$2F31%7Csort:date and see the first message on the group where net.micro.ti was reborn as comp.sys.ti .

 

Anyways, if someone with some web skills, there are some ways to crawl the usenet newsgroup. There is a utility at https://github.com/icy/google-group-crawler that I am not familiar with its use that may be able to grab those messages.

 

If someone has the skillset to retrieve the messages, I would really like to preserve their content and put those messages into a database format for a BBS we can all read, etc.

 

Minimally, if someone has the skillset, I would need the posts in some kind of database format with the following fields:

 

Date:

Subject:

Author/Poster:

Message content:

 

From there, I can use my other Excel tools to process the database and export it into a common message base format.

 

Anyways, I hope someone has the skills.

 

Beery

Edited May 29, 2018 by BeeryMiller

[+chue]

I am making an attempt at this. I will let you know what I come up with.

[Toucan]

I have e-mail messages in my Outlook for the TI Listserver dating from 1997-1999. This is pre-Yahoo/eGroups. If there is a way you could use these, let me know. I have 1,434 messages from 1997, 5,085 from 1998, and 7,003 from 1999.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Toucan

[Toucan]

I know someone else must have messages going back to 1996 from the Listserver (when it started), as there was an archive made by Mr.Moon around 2001 that went back that far. That archive has since disappeared. My e-mails start in August 1997 to the end of The River Listserver in on 12/31/99.

Edited May 29, 2018 by Toucan

[+9640News]

I am making an attempt at this. I will let you know what I come up with.

 

Thanks for looking into this.

 

Beery

[+9640News]

I know someone else must have messages going back to 1996 from the Listserver (when it started), as there was an archive made by Mr.Moon around 2001 that went back that far. That archive has since disappeared. My e-mails start in August 1997 to the end of The River Listserver in on 12/31/99.

 

I do need to understand things a bit here. Just to make sure I understand things here, this content is not included in the postings on the TI-99/4A group on Yahoogroups? If it is included in Yahoogroups, I already have it.

 

If not, then I am thinking of the best way to get a dump of those messages. I think the easiest way if they are in Outlook, is to create a new "PST" file. Then highlight and copy the files, and paste them into the new PST file. Then, it would be just a matter of sending me the PST file. From there, I could then open it up in my Outlook, and write the necessary code to export those emails out as text files so they could be imported into a message base on my BBS

 

You could then zip that file up, and either email it to me or upload it to my BBS at 9640news.ddns.net Port 9640.

 

Beery

[+9640News]

I also want anyone else to know that if they want copies of these message bases for a BBS they have or want to setup, I have no issue providing them a copy as well so we have multiple resources.

 

Beery

[Toucan]

 

I do need to understand things a bit here. Just to make sure I understand things here, this content is not included in the postings on the TI-99/4A group on Yahoogroups? If it is included in Yahoogroups, I already have it.

 

If not, then I am thinking of the best way to get a dump of those messages. I think the easiest way if they are in Outlook, is to create a new "PST" file. Then highlight and copy the files, and paste them into the new PST file. Then, it would be just a matter of sending me the PST file. From there, I could then open it up in my Outlook, and write the necessary code to export those emails out as text files so they could be imported into a message base on my BBS

 

You could then zip that file up, and either email it to me or upload it to my BBS at 9640news.ddns.net Port 9640.

 

Beery

Sounds like a plan. (.pst files). No, these messages are from The River Listserver. Basically, what happened was this:

 

1. net.micro.ti was founded in 1984

2. comp.sys.ti was formed as a part of the reconfiguring of Usenet in 1987

3. Tom Wills establishes a listserver @theriver.net in 1996 (which helps drive away traffic during that time from comp.sys.ti)

4. Tom Wills's hosting provider (The River) wants to start charging more as he's using up a lot of bandwidth running his listserver, so he joins eGroups in December of 1999 and shifts operations to there

5. eGroups is bought by Yahoo! and becomes Yahoo! Groups in 2000

6. An AtariAge TI forum is started in 2009 and becomes the main TI hangout up to this date

 

So these messages that I have are from the pre-Yahoo TI days, and are not included in that group. TheRiver Listserver was started in 1996, so there are more messages out there if someone can fill in those prior years, that would be great. I know I don't have all the 1997 messages, but have most after August of that year, so filling in that year would be helpful as well.

[Toucan]

 

I do need to understand things a bit here. Just to make sure I understand things here, this content is not included in the postings on the TI-99/4A group on Yahoogroups? If it is included in Yahoogroups, I already have it.

 

If not, then I am thinking of the best way to get a dump of those messages. I think the easiest way if they are in Outlook, is to create a new "PST" file. Then highlight and copy the files, and paste them into the new PST file. Then, it would be just a matter of sending me the PST file. From there, I could then open it up in my Outlook, and write the necessary code to export those emails out as text files so they could be imported into a message base on my BBS

 

You could then zip that file up, and either email it to me or upload it to my BBS at 9640news.ddns.net Port 9640.

 

Beery

I also could export as csv according to my export options in Outlook. Would you prefer .csv or .pst? Maybe I'll just send both.

[+9640News]

I also could export as csv according to my export options in Outlook. Would you prefer .csv or .pst? Maybe I'll just send both.

 

OK on both. Not sure how much embedded html may have existed back in that timeframe. Likely minimal if any which would make csv easy to handle. However, if there was an issue, the may be easier to work from the original with the PST.

 

If the filesize does not exceed the upload requirements here, you could post the file(s) here if nobody minds.

Beery

[Toucan]

 

OK on both. Not sure how much embedded html may have existed back in that timeframe. Likely minimal if any which would make csv easy to handle. However, if there was an issue, the may be easier to work from the original with the PST.

 

If the filesize does not exceed the upload requirements here, you could post the file(s) here if nobody minds.

Beery

I already sent them to your msn.com address listed in your profile. Let me know if that's okay.

[+9640News]

That should be fine. My phone timed out trying to download the file(s) which is not unusual as the coverage is not great right here. I should be able to get the files tonight when I get home.

 

Beery

[+Schmitzi]

I have full backups of the Yahoo-Groups up to May 2017

 

 

[+9640News]

I have full backups of the Yahoo-Groups up to May 2017

 

Messages-15-May-2017.JPG

 

Statistics-May-2017.JPG

 

I've got backups of the TI and Geneve groups already posted. I do not have the SWPB group and was never aware there was a Texas Instruments group. What kind of format is that content in?

 

Beery

[+chue]

I have run the script that you reference from github, and the end result is I have 15,000+ messages stored in text files in RFC822 format. I wrote some code to parse these messages and put them into Excel format. I will include here a sample: two RFC822 message files, and an Excel file containing the fields you requested from those two messages.

 

Let me know which format makes sense for you - the raw message files or the Excel file. I will post all the data once we figure out what makes sense.

sample-messages.zip

[+9640News]

I have run the script that you reference from github, and the end result is I have 15,000+ messages stored in text files in RFC822 format. I wrote some code to parse these messages and put them into Excel format. I will include here a sample: two RFC822 message files, and an Excel file containing the fields you requested from those two messages.

 

Let me know which format makes sense for you - the raw message files or the Excel file. I will post all the data once we figure out what makes sense.

 

The excel spreadsheet will be sufficient. I did notice one thing, and it is likely something you can not control, but I am guessing a CR/LF or maybe just a CR is not being captured properly as I see words with no spaces appearing at intervals of what would be an End-Of-Line spot.

 

If it is nothing obvious to resolve, then do not worry about it as it will still be easy to interpret the contents of the messages which is more than what we have.

​Otherwise, you have made a giant step towards reclaiming some historical messages.

 

Thanks.

 

Beery

[+9640News]

I already sent them to your msn.com address listed in your profile. Let me know if that's okay.

 

I just checked my email, and there were no messages with files attached. I checked both my inbox and spam folders. As I have seen things like this happen before, make sure you spelled my first name correctly as Beery so the email address would be Beery_Asst at msn dot com. The other email address if you want to cc: another one on a resend would be Beery at USWingNuts dot com. I can't count the number of times people have misspelled my name as Berry when it should have been Beery. I am a one and only Beery <grin>.

 

Hope this helps.

​Beery

[+chue]

 

The excel spreadsheet will be sufficient. I did notice one thing, and it is likely something you can not control, but I am guessing a CR/LF or maybe just a CR is not being captured properly as I see words with no spaces appearing at intervals of what would be an End-Of-Line spot.

 

If it is nothing obvious to resolve, then do not worry about it as it will still be easy to interpret the contents of the messages which is more than what we have.

​Otherwise, you have made a giant step towards reclaiming some historical messages.

 

Thanks.

 

Beery

 

The body text is the raw data, so may be missing one or the other (CR or LF).

 

I have included both formats, in case something was lost in translation to the Excel file:

 

out-full.zip - the Excel file

comp.sys.ti.zip - the files that were pulled down using the script from GitHub

 

Edit: I forgot to mention - Excel will complain about unreadable characters when opening the file. You can still open it and Excel will strip those out.

out-full.zip

comp.sys.ti.zip

Edited May 29, 2018 by chue

[+9640News]

Thanks for the files. I'm working on the Excel spreadsheet now. First thing is to manipulate all the dates into a consistent date string as it looks like the dates were handled in multiple formats.

 

Beery

[+acadiel]

I will try to reach out to Louis Guion that ran the 9900 Connection BBS in Dallas. He said it's sitting in a corner and off since the mid 90s, but likely still has the data.

 

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk

[+Schmitzi]

 

I've got backups of the TI and Geneve groups already posted. I do not have the SWPB group and was never aware there was a Texas Instruments group. What kind of format is that content in?

 

Beery

 

It is German, and just hold some files...

[+9640News]

Thanks for the Listserv messages. I will begin work on those messages after I complete the comp.sys.ti spreadsheet of messages. I was able to do some tweaking and replacing of date strings to further minimize manual intervention, but still have some work to do. Should take about an another hours worth of work. Seems some of the headaches I caused myself when I was cross posting TI-ECHO to comp.sys.ti through GEnie. Somewhere/somehow, the process of using an email to post to comp.sys.ti through GEnie's servers resulted in an atypical date string after all the processing. I wasn't the only one, so there were other systems doing things a bit differently as well.

 

Before I post the messages on my BBS since I already have an interface to comp.sys.ti, I have got to ensure when I do post, all those messages do not get reposted on the group as "new".

 

 

Beery

[+9640News]

I have done some massaging of the spreadsheet and added some VBA code in the excel file that will write out text files.

 

Dates are now in a consistent format. For the high volume posters on the comp.sys.ti group, where names were obvious and I had the time, I changed the incomplete email address to the individual's name.

 

The text files and a special INI file are for a utility my BBS uses so they can be imported.

 

As the messages were gathered from a web interface, they have the same issue I had to deal with on YahooGroups when I dumped the TI and Geneve groups. Formatting is not perfect, however the content is there.

 

Here is the file in zip format. Keep in mind it has a macro for the special routine I wrote, so you will get a caution on whether to open the file, etc.

 

CompSysTI - Copy.zip