Digital Archaeology: Floppy Disk #14 – SEP84.DOC

2 days ago

A summary for those that haven't necessarily been keeping up with this series:

I found a number of 5.25" disks at a thrift store a number of years ago (sometime in the late 1990s to the best of my recollection). I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25" disk drive and extracting the contents a several years back. Since then, I have been occasionally posting the content 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.

The following 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 with. 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 SEP84.DOC. This appears to be a report that gives details on the usage of the SIG (how many hours each user spent in the SIG, etc.). This is in the from of an e-mail from someone named KELLY who was presumably an employee of Delphi. The e-mail is dated October 4th, 1984.

There are two SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that have been mentioned repeatedly in these files. One is the "Close Encounters" SIG and the other is the "Friendship Circle" SIG though I'm not entirely sure they were different. "Close Encounters" may have evolved from "Friendship Circle". In any case "Closed Circle" is mentioned in this report but maybe this is an alias or the name changed again at some point. This report has a much larger number of users than the previous one from August.

One thing to note is how it lists "PRIME" minutes separately from "OFFPRIME" minutes. Off prime minutes would have cheaper than prime minutes or even free (outside of the monthly Delphi subscription fee anyway). These would typically be from some time later in the evening until some time in the morning. Prime minutes would be the busiest time or at least the time when business customers were online. If you were online during prime minutes than you were paying a per minute access fee in addition to your subscription. This is kind of how things worked in the early days of cell phones too.

This file is dated September 2nd, 1985 and was in a subdirectory titled "SIGUSAGE".

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SEP84.DOC
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