Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

This topic was created by Peter Gathercole .

  1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

    Back in the 1980s, before the Web existed, I used to read a tech news bulletin called UNIGRAM.X that was distributed via email, particularly UUNET.

    It was, I suppose, a bit like the Reg. without the tabloid headlines and comments, distributed several times a week. There was also another link with the Register, in that according to his biog. Timothy Pickett Morgan was the editor at one time.

    It was a subscription service, at least for a while, although it was very common for someone in a company to have a subscription, and then distribute it to other people in the company to read.

    What I would really like to find is an archive of the news items, but almost unbelievably, Google et. al. have captured almost no information about UNIGRAM.X.

    Is this an example of information falling through the cracks, being neither old enough to merit historians re-constructing the history, nor new enough to have been hoovered up by the Internet's web crawlers?

    If anybody has any information, or would just like to reminisce, I would be very interested in reading their comments, and especially interested if such an archive exists.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

      Now THERE's a name from the past!

      Seems to me that Maureen O'Gara was the last person to have control of the Unigram.X handle (mid 2000s(??)). Should be fairly easy to track down an email address for her. Failing that, TPM is approachable.

      That's all I have time to help with at the moment, dealing with a bit of a fire here in Sonoma. If you find an archive, please mention it here. If anything jogs my memory further, I'll let you know.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

        Who downvoted jake? I'll admit that Maureen O'Gara appears to have a less than stellar reputation, especially over the SCO stories of the noughties, but his information added to my quest to find a Unigram.X archive.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

          Any luck, Peter?

          Things have settled down to their usual dull roar around here. If you like I can ask a few folks from the proverbial "old days" for clues. No guarantees ... for some reason, kids these days don't seem to understand how to save simple ASCII text files. Look at the gookids and their squandering of the DejaNews archive ...

          1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

            Re: Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

            Jake,

            I did not take it any further, as I've been busy myself (mainly work related - still a wage-slave even if as a 'consultant').

            If you have actual contacts who may know, I am still interested. I should have followed up with TPM, but I think I got on his bad-books when he was posting HPC stuff on the Register, as I was a bit picky with corrections to one of his articles about the UK Metoffice, where I was working at the time.

            Probably all in my mind, and he probably wouldn't remember anyway, but me agonizing about the past and being too self-critical are a couple of my failings.

            Way back, you wrote a post that implied that we had crossed paths some point in the past, but try as I might, the only contact I remember with anybody on the US West coast was when I was working on UTS on Amdahl mainframes while at AT&T. Most of the contact I've had with people in the US has been east coast in AT&T and IBM (and possibly DEC thinking back).

            Anyway, glad the fires are less of a problem. I have a traveling friend who was caught up in them with his family a little, but they're OK too.

            1. jake Silver badge

              Re: Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

              Mail sent.

              If I were you, I'd contact TPM anyway. I doubt he'll bite. In fact, he'll probably turn out to be just as curious as we are ... and he probably has better contacts.

              I think we've met. A million years ago (internet time, call it late 1991 or so), I needed to hook an email server to ibm.co.uk ... it was a Sun Workstation, running NET's Network Management Software for an IDNX based WAN (E-1 and E-3, and a pilot build redundant fiber link). IBM was still quite leery of "connected to the world" SMTP back then, but found someone on-staff who was quite familiar with it to vet my changes to the network. I believe that person was yourself.

              The fires are out. We've had some rain in the last seven weeks, and the burnt patches are turning green (many native seeds require fire to germinate). Rebuilding is underway. It was bad, and we lost some folks (44 now, a man died of his burns about a week ago) ... but over all, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Lake Counties are counting our blessings. It could have been a whole lot worse.

              I personally didn't lose anything except a couple thousand grape vines on a leased parcel in the Mayacamas Mountains ... and even then, we had already harvested and the plants were going into hibernation. They may be salvageable, we'll see in the Spring. If not, there are plenty more where those came from. Onwards & upwards.

              1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

                Re: Anybody know of a UNIGRAM.X archive?

                I think you may have me confused with one of my then colleges, probably Jan-Simon (surname withheld, as I haven't talked with him to check, he was previously at Imperial College, so knew Sun kit really well), or Paul (ex. of ICL and OSF) who were performing the sysadmin at the UK AIX Systems Support Centre, although 1991 would be around the time that I started picking up what Jan-Simon was doing as he was preparing to leave, so it is possible.

                Jan-Simon had big shoes to fill, and I was standing on the shoulders of giants when I moved in to try to manage what he was instrumental in setting up. I believe he's with Google now.

                I'm flattered that you even remember the team. Few people either inside or outside of IBM do now.

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