Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
John Rumm wrote:
Who got it off the ground in the first place?

Don't know... John S was about then, he might...

I always assumed it was Matthew Marks.


Actually... 'twas I.

Must have been early-mid 90s - it predates the google archive a bit. It
was certainly before the WWW and commercial internet took off, and I
remember accessing it via a university mainframe.

I was spending a lot of time doing up my then home, and looking for
online advice: at the time there was a reasonable amount of diy-type
traffic buried amongst the rubbish in uk.misc (there were no other
related newsgroups at all). I floated the idea of forming a separate
diy newsgroup which curried some support, so I looked into how to do it.

I can't remember exactly the then "procedure" was back then - certainly
it was pretty minimal - but I remember having to identify some official
Important Bloke in the uk usenet heirachy and emailing him; consequently
I think an RFD was posted somewhere to which a small handful of people
responded with 'yeah good idea', and a couple of weeks later the
Important Bloke set up uk.d-i-y.

ISTR back then there was only a very small handful of uk newsgroups, and
certainly no heirarchical structure, which is how uk.d-i-y came to exist
as a top-level group. As for the hyphenated group name which quite a
lot of people have slagged off over the years; mea culpa I think - it
was for no particular reason other than to delineate the letters as an
abbreviation without introducing full stops.

Little did I imagine that 15 years later.... etc etc etc

David